What if you could solve your problems by shifting your perspective? That’s got to be worth a try
The Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck once said: “What makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured.” I think about this line a lot. One of its implications is that problems in life aren’t only a consequence of how things are, but of how you feel they ought to be. If you didn’t need things to be different, there would be no problem. This is perhaps most obvious in the case of obsessive perfectionism: if you are the type who will only deem Christmas acceptable if everything goes exactly to plan – no family arguments, children thrilled with every gift, the crust on the roast potatoes precisely crunchy enough – you are sure to be disappointed. And the real cause of your disappointment won’t be how reality unfolded, but the impossible standard to which you were holding it. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with soggy roast potatoes, after all. You add the wrongness, just as you add the gravy.
The great insight of Zen, and several other traditions, is that all suffering might arise this way, from the inner insistence that reality not be how it is. At least in principle, there are always two ways to address any problem: you can change the way things are, or change the fact that you wish they weren’t that way. And, as a practical matter, you often can’t change how things are. So the beginning of psychological freedom, to quote the Zen writer John Tarrant, lies in asking the question: “Wait a minute, what if this is it?”
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