Lesson 2: Peace of Mind

Perspective. It’s one of those crucial internal measures that lets us organise our thoughts, opinions and feelings – allowing us to reassess and reevaluate the importance of our problems in everyday life. It allows us to realise the insignificance of our worries and allows us one step closer to coming to peace and acceptance of ourselves.

FIRST OF ALL… I must clarify that the worries I speak of are the ones that cause me everyday stress and hold me back from feeling completely at ease. I can’t truly define what this means for you, but for me, I just end up feeling only 80% of myself and not being able to completely and openly embrace all the good and bad things in my life. In other words, I become quite the whiny bastard, and for lack of better words, feel like like a general pile of poop.

Okay, so where this whole train of thought started was on the way home from the city. Cheesy or whatever, but it’s generally the time I allow myself to collect my thoughts and just… think. Sometimes it’s a bad thing, but sometimes it allows me to get to a complete and total philosophical, Confucius-like state where I think, “Damn, Kylie, you be brainy as hell.”

I started to think about how there’s essentially 2 more weeks left of Uni, then the dreaded exams are just around the corner. I thought about failure and all that bad stuff… But, then I started thinking about how lucky I was. I thought about how my problems seriously ain’t no thang. I thought about how the world’s care-factor for my problems probably ranked at the extreme far end of the ‘don’t give a @$%& zone’ on a scale that reached the billions.

As I hope you guys are all aware… there are over 7 billion people in the world, and everybody is basically a bundle of problems. Some people have real problems. The other end is us; the Gen-Y kids who are endowed with a pantry full of food, a closet full of clothes, technology within our grasp and a myriad of things we take for granted. As some poor third-world country child barely gets by in a week, we slave away on the internet, crying into our $100 bills thinking how much of a douche-bag the teacher back in Year 7 was for failing us in P.E.

By no means am I saying, “Hey you! Every time you’re feeling bad about your life, think about how unlucky that starving child is… and then start feeling good about yourself!” No. What I’m trying to get through is that you should put things into perspective. In comparison to somebody else’s problems, yours appears minuscular, but where it really counts is how much dominance you let it have over you.

Don’t hold yourself back from feeling happy.
This is something I’m still coming to terms with, but it’s something I hope future-Kylie will stick by.
There’s no point in being worried about failure or ‘that-thing-you-should’ve-done-that-one-time-but-didn’t’. There’s no worth in the ‘what ifs’ or ‘if I could go back in time’, because these thoughts hold you back from your full potential. Everything that you’ve done, felt or said in the past and the present shape who you are and who you are to become. Everything that you experience can be considered a growth. It’s really only what you make of it, if you want it to be a failure, it can be a failure. If you put it into the perspective of ‘bettering yourself’, then that’s what it’ll be.

Sure, you can feel crappy for a little bit and think about how your problem is the skid-mark on the underpants of society… but after that, be grateful for what you have, and don’t let the goings get you down. The only problems we have are the ones we allow to persist in our lives.

So, until next time, my friends!

Kylie out. x