In his post ‘A Life of Peacefulness‘, Leo Babauta makes an extremely interesting point: when faced with chaos and stress, our first reaction may be some kind of escapism (I am myself guilty of it, sometimes). What we should do though is to learn how to remain peaceful in this environment.
I quite like the list all the different types of escapism he mentions, like:
- “Try to get our world in order, trying to control everything
- Hide from all the things we do, try not to think about it all
- Complain about it, about the burden of it all
- etc.“
And I could certainly add more to the list. Whether real escape and flight, or only in our mind, it is true that we tend to escape difficult situation in one way or the other.
The revolutionary approach he mentions of instead trying to be internally peaceful in the midst of the storm is an interesting one, although certainly quite tough to achieve. He proposes 3 steps:
- Face the difficulty
- Open & Relax
- Take the next step, in peace
How about trying to apply this framework to your current chaos?
