To Live Is Where You Will Find Life’s Worth

There is a perfectionist in all of us.

We desire life to be precisely the way we expected it to be. It has to be perfect for our fancy.

We want our careers to go in a certain way; our spouses to behave to our liking; our children to do what we tell them; the world to take notice of us; so on and so forth. But sooner or later, when reality bites, we often find ourselves watering down our desires and reminding ourselves to refrain from wanting to control everything in our life.

Is life worth living then?

This is a question often asked of us by people who are having doubts, or who are going through very tough challenges in their lives. The answer is quite simple in fact, but there are still a significant number of people around the world who choose to end their lives prematurely every year! Hence, the wheel of karma never rests.

Everyone wants to have 100% of everything they wish for in life. Who doesn’t want that? But unfortunately, no one ever gets everything 100% of the time! This is a natural law that applies to everyone without any exception. So it doesn't really matter your station in life, you won't get everything you want even if you were the most talented, the richest or the most powerful person in this world. You may get more than others, but you will never get everything your heart desires. The sooner you accept this, the sooner the perfectionist in you will leave you.

The hardest part of our work is not telling someone that his days are ending soon. The Truth of mortal life is that it will end one day. It is undeniable. The hardest part is to tell someone that he is allowing his alter-ego, the perfectionist, to reign supreme in his life.

Conversely, how do you convince a perfectionist that he is, in fact, imperfect?

How do you drive home the message that the emotional distress he is experiencing is due to his altered views of this imperfect world? That the unhappiness, the bad decisions and outcomes are just shadows of who he is? Shadows that he doesn’t see because he is in the dark? As ironic as it sounds, reincarnated perfectionists suffer a great deal in the 21st century. Notwithstanding their successes, they suffer from a great deal of emotional stress and turmoil.

Perfectionists do not see the world as it is. They see the world as it should be. That the world, and everyone in it, should revolve around them. But they can’t see what they do not realise. If a doctor tells the prognosis of a medical condition, the patient may relate to it based on the medical symptoms. A perfectionist usually retorts in denial: if not for me, there would be nothing, or, if you had listened to me, we would not be in this predicament!

Enlightenment is knowing with the highest clarity what's truly important for us to realise in life. There are underlying karmic forces at play when we meet challenges in this life, but we may yet know the forces or the reasons. But we often allow ourselves to be clouded by our desires that we make haphazard decisions with our disquiet, unstable or unsound minds. We can only blame ourselves because we understand the logic that any decisions must always be made with a calm, stable and sound mind. So if we're not in the right state of mind, then it is imperative to delay the decision until such time the mind can be made calm, stable and sound.

Do not aim for a perfect life in a world that is never going to be perfect. This world is ruled permanently by the invisible hand known as impermanence. And don't think of changing the world, or making it perfect for you either. You'll only end up where others had failed before you- in despair!

Live instead, with the aim to realise and culminate all your reincarnated journeys to the eventual goal of enlightenment. And to free your spirit from the incessant cycle of births and rebirths.

So is life worth living? You will only find its worth when you are living it.