The one lesson from School that changed my Life
Stop complaining about what’s wrong!
Life is going very well and everything finally seems to be falling into place…
Snap!!!
Something happens and you weren’t ready for it… and it all goes down! You feel devastated and think, Why this? Why me?
Ever been there? I bet!
One thing we all must have realized is that life is not a straight smooth road. It’s more like a roller-coaster… with lots of ups and downs! Sometimes things work in our favor, sometimes they don’t.
The question is, What do you do when things go down?
You could either resist it and fight against it. Or you could accept it and walk through it.
Fortunately, I’ve had some amazing teachers and mentors since early life, and one of them taught me to take the later path the hard way!
Now, school is a whole different world! Teachers very happily and lovingly solve our issues — academic and non-academic… or so I believed. Until we had this new class teacher who said, “Don’t come to me with problems, come to me with solutions”, whenever we approached him with any non-academic issue. And I thought that this person has gone crazy! He’s the class teacher and he should be the one bringing solutions, what does he want!
But we had no choice, and being the class representative, I had to tell him the issue and a few potential solutions out of which he would choose to implement one. I only realized much later what he was up to and the sentence got tattooed into my memory!
Much later, I once found myself in a situation where everyone seemed to be complaining and fixing the blame for something that had gone wrong. And I was thinking, “Okay, so what happened has happened, what can we do now?”. And I found it very odd that I was apparently the only person in the room thinking that! But then it struck, I was programmed to do so.
Our class teacher, back in school, had very appropriately nurtured us to stop wasting time complaining and to think about the possibilities of what can be done after accepting what has already happened. And I am very grateful to him for changing the way I think.
Trust me here, it’s not difficult to find the opportunities that life presents to us when we stop complaining and start accepting. In fact, it’s quite interesting that you’d often amaze yourself in the process!
The Lesson
The first step to dealing with a situation gone wrong is to fully accept what has happened. It does two things for you-
- You stop wasting time and energy pointlessly complaining.
- You can use that time and energy to make better decisions within the moment and reach a solution.
In short,
When you accept ‘what is’ and stop contemplating ‘what if’, you recognize the uselessness of trying to control the current of the river of life; instead, you concentrate your energy to position yourself better in the river.
