On Dealing With Problems
when you're not dealing with problems
This essay has been written entirely with generative natural intelligence. AI tools may have been used for grammar, spellcheck and research.
A lot of the suffering and stress that we experience day-to-day comes from overthinking. Worrying about the future, rehashing things that we’ve done or not done, analyzing other people’s behaviour and motivations, ruminating about what would really be best for us, the best way to head off imagined disaster, what might go wrong and what we would do about it, how to convince other people to see things our way, etc., etc.
When we’re engaged in this kind of overthinking, we think that we are dealing with our problems, but are we?
When we call problems to mind, it can create an illusion where we feel like we are responding to real things, struggling with real things, when actually we’re just struggling with our own imagination.
We may really have problems, but when we think about our imagination of those problems, we’re not actually dealing with our problems.
What we’re actually doing is not dealing with our problems1.
The idea that thinking about our problems is a way of dealing with our problems is, for the most part, an illusion.
What we are actually doing when we overthink is dealing with our thoughts. We struggle with thoughts and feelings, move them around. We analyze them. We inflate them. We elaborate them, and we exhaust ourselves without ever touching the actual problem or problems.
There always comes a time in life for dealing with the actual problem, and that time is when the actual problem presents itself.
Of course, when it actually presents itself, it may reveal itself that it’s not actually a problem at all.
Some of the time, at least, there actually isn’t a problem; we just imagined one.
Some of the time, sure, there is a problem, and then when the problem presents itself, we will deal with it. At that point, we will actually be dealing with our problems.
We should consider: which self, which version of us, will actually be better at dealing with a problem when it presents itself?
The one which has been exhausting itself and building up thoughts of fear and defensiveness and anger and worry? Or would another version of ourselves deal with the problem better, the one which has not been worrying, overthinking, strategizing, resenting, defending, and catastrophizing, the one who has been quietly enjoying our life, taking care of whatever needs to be taken care of, nurturing our relationship with the present moment?
When we nurture our relationship with the present moment, that means that we’re becoming more skilful in the way that we relate to ourselves and to reality itself.
How well we deal with future moments is not dependent on how we prepare for them.
It’s dependent on how well we deal with present moments.
As the sage Ramana Maharshi said, “Engage yourself in the living present. The future will take care of itself. Do not worry about the future.”
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Aside from the fact that we are struggling with thoughts, not real events or people, we are also at that moment not dealing with what may be our biggest problem of all : overthinking.