The Pain of Achieving

If you are not happy with how life is treating you, I have one suggestion.

Find something that you can do or have as a means to explore.  Think of playing or experimenting, instead of achieving.  Look at it as discovery instead of achievement.  Wanting so much to achieve can be painful, if you are not in the right frame of mind.  But when you do something for the love of it or simply to see what happens when you do this or do that, you get a different feeling.  It's just easier and you feel overjoyed by what you discover or what you learn about your work or life in general.  Life can change for the better just because you tweaked your mind to think in a different way.

Take art, for example.  With this new mind, I don't get stuck when I want to create a painting.  Without the pressure to achieve a masterpiece, painting is no longer painful.  I just sketch a little bit and then wait until something creative happens.  The canvass comes to life all of a sudden, because I'm trying out how this color works or how the way I hold the brush works...just having fun with experimenting.  An impression of something starts to build.  I stop and look at it from a small distance and ideas start to flow.  This time, I ask myself what I like about it...not if it's perfect.  So many things I can do now with the creative process.  What a relief.

This mental freedom requires psychological conditioning, but it's so worth it because, like I said, the door to your imagination opens up.