Dealing with Frustrations.
I find it interesting that when reading Meditations, the writing of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, he faced a lot of frustrations.
Being the most powerful man in the world at the time, you would imagine that frustration would be something that he could swat away like an annoying fly.
Not so.
Begin each day by telling yourself: today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil.
So regardless of how powerful or influential someone is, you still don’t have the power to change and affect everything. The world will bring frustrating situations and problems to us continuously. It is tough being human — but there are multiple ways to handle problems.
One way that I have found quite beneficial whenever I am faced with a new problem is to remember that I am actually quite the problem-solving machine.
I have faced tens of thousands of problems, which at the time felt quite serious.
I somehow managed to resolve and get around each and every one of them. Some of them now feel laughingly small compared to what came later, but at the time, they caused some severe disturbance to my peace of mind.
It is as if I have moved up several levels in the game of life, and I can look back to myself five, ten, or twenty years ago, and see that those problems were really nothing.
The question is, of course, what will my future self think of the problems that I am facing now?! Probably the same thing, he will look back at me now and laugh about the things that I was worried about it, how straightforward it was to solve things, and how much time I spent uselessly worrying about things that I could not really control.
I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.
Mark Twain.
