Two activities take up huge pieces of our lives, and both of them can easily fly under the radar of our conscious attention. The activities are seeking and resisting. Any time you dislike or resent what you’re doing, or the experience you’re having, you’re in resistance. And the strangest thing of all is what you’re resisting: life itself, life as it is.
When we want our experience (in other words, that little piece of our life that’s happening right now) to be something other than it is, we’re seeking. We don’t necessarily know what we’re seeking, other than something different from what we have right now. Seeking and resisting on an ongoing basis are why most of us have a difficult time experiencing peace and well-being.
You can almost think of seeking and resisting as co-joined twins- one doesn’t appear without the other. The moment we start resisting the experience we’re having, seeking raises its little head, and our thinking gets very creative about the experience we think we should be having.
I’m something of an expert at seeking and resisting because, like most of us, I spent years and years of my life resisting the experience I was having and seeking a different one, one that I believed would be better, and make me feel better.
The attitude I carried around me was one that can be summed up by this phrase: It’s not supposed to be like this; it’s supposed to be different.
Seeking can only happen when we’ve first judged the circumstance we’re in, or the experience we’re having, and decided we don’t want it to be happening to us now. Then resistance takes over. If we spend that much of our lives seeking and resisting, how can there be any space for peace and well-being? That explains why the peace and well-being we were all born with seem to remain beyond our reach.
Whether it’s a pleasant experience, or an unpleasant one, the experience we’re having at this moment is exactly the one we’re supposed to be having.
Life knows what we need.
If we were supposed to be having an experience different from the one we’re having, we’d be having it. To believe otherwise assumes we know what we need better than life does. Put into those words, doesn’t it sound like the height of arrogance? Completely innocent arrogance, but arrogance nonetheless.
Believing we know what we need better than life does keeps us mired in unhappiness, and in an endless cycle of seeking and resisting. It’s possible to spend an entire life in this cycle. Many of us do, without even being aware of it. This explains why peace, well-being and happiness seem to be rare commodities for so many of us.
The simplest way to describe happiness, peace, and well-being is this: they are the absence of resistance. When there’s no resisting, there’s nothing to seek, and happiness, peace, and well-being come back into view.
Remember, we’re not at our best when we try to command life. We’re at our best when we respond to what life presents to us.
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