I was thinking about…

Eckhart Tolle’s Wisdom for Everyday Life Challenges

by Andy Lee

We’ve all been caught up in a perpetual cycle of angst and anxiety lately. Every new day seems to bring fresh reasons to panic and stew over the state of the world. It’s like we’ve forgotten that famous Eckhart Tolle truth bomb: “Life isn’t as serious as the mind makes it out to be.”

It’s so easy to get swept up in outrage cycles and doomsday narratives, letting perceived slights and inconveniences snowball into total meltdowns. We make mountains out of molehills until that anxious state becomes the default vibe.

That’s why I’ll always be grateful for the advice my former father-in-law once gave me about keeping perspectives in check: “Write down whatever’s stressing you out on a piece of paper. Fold it up and put it away for 30 days. When you revisit it, that issue rarely feels as earth-shattering as it did initially.”

That simple act of creating literal distance between life’s panics and your headspace is invaluable. It forces you to pause the obsessive thought loops and meltdowns. More often than not, a month’s time reveals how meaningless and impermanent those blips of outrage truly were.

Because left unchecked, our brains naturally exaggerate threats and inconveniences into cataclysmic events worthy of total meltdown. We start operating in a constant state of crisis mode until even tiny grievances make us unravel completely.

Taking a breather and separating from that for a while is crucial for not letting the mind blow things out of proportion. It’s a reminder that no matter how insurmountable life’s turmoils feel in the moment, with some patience and perspective most of it was just background noise all along.

As Tolle reminds us, life is rarely as heavy and serious as our fearmongering psyches make it out to be in the thick of it all. Sometimes you just need to jot it all down, shove it in a drawer for a while, and revisit when a level head returns. The world’ll keep on spinning either way.

Stay breezy, keep coolin’ it! 😎