Don’t Be a Dead Tree Stump

“If we can approach our problem without judging, without identifying, then the causes that lie beneath it are revealed. If we would understand a problem, we must set aside our desires, accumulated experience, pattern of thought. The difficulty is not in the problem itself but in our approach to it. The scars of yesterday prevent the right approach.”

— J Krishnamurti

Imagine a person who needs to attend an important meeting on a cold winter morning, but his car won’t start. He gets mad and turns the ignition even more frantically. And again. He gets so obsessed that he fails to think of alternatives—hailing a cab if he can’t figure out what’s wrong with the starter, or postponing the meeting.

The man places so much import on his goals and wants that he totally misses the point: the car works according to its own laws. It makes no difference to the car that the man has to get downtown. If, instead, he simply accepts things and backs himself, solutions will flow in thick and fast.

In life too, we cannot see solutions when we get agitated, when we place our desires and wants over rta (the natural order that regulates the cosmos and everything within it). As Krishnamurti said:

“As the stump of a dead tree in the middle of a stream gathers the floating wreckage, so we gather, we cling to our accumulation; thus we and the deathless stream of life are separate. We sit on the dead stump of our accumulation and consider life and death; we do not let go of the ever-accumulating process and be of the living waters.”

But if you can see yourself as a part of the system that you operate in, then you will think less of yourself. Not in a self-deprecating way but in a way that fuels humility. Then, Mihaly Csikzentmihaly wrote, you can accept that your goals may have to be subordinated to a greater entity, that you may have to play by a different set of rules from what you prefer.

Ironic as it sounds, such humility makes you stronger.

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