Evans Akpo

If you try to control everything, and then worry about the things you can’t control, you are setting yourself up for a lifetime of frustration and misery.

Some forces are out of your control, but you can control how you react to things. Everyone’s life has positive and negative aspects – whether you’re happy or not depends greatly on which aspects you focus on. The best thing you can do is to let go of what you can’t control, and invest your energy in the things you can – like your attitude.

Happiness is letting go of what you assume your life is supposed to be like right now and sincerely embracing it for everything that it is.

Truth be told, holding on can be incredibly painful! Holding on can directly contribute to stress, health complications, unhappiness, depressive thoughts, relationship problems, and so on.

Yet, as human beings, we cling desperately to almost everything.

We don’t like change, so we resist it.

We want life to be the way we think it “should” be.

We get attached to our fantasies…. even when they hurt us. Now lets try the power of letting go and see the result.

So how can we stop holding on?

By realizing that there’s nothing to hold on to in the first place.

Most of the things we desperately try to hold on to, as if they’re real, solid, everlasting fixtures in our lives, aren’t really there. Or if they are there in some form, they’re changing, fluid, impermanent, or simply imagined in our minds.

Life gets a lot easier to deal with when we understand this.

Imagine you’re blindfolded and treading water in the center of a large swimming pool, and you’re struggling desperately to grab the edge of the pool that you think is nearby, but really it’s not – it’s far away. Trying to grab that imaginary edge is stressing you out, and tiring you out, as you splash around aimlessly trying to holding on to something that isn’t there.

Now imagine you pause, take a deep breath, and realize that there’s nothing nearby to hold on to. Just water around you. You can continue to struggle with grabbing at something that doesn’t exist… or you can accept that there’s only water around you, and relax, and float.

Today, I challenge you to ask yourself:

• What are you desperately trying to hold on to in your life?
• How is it affecting you?

Then imagine the thing you’re trying to hold on to doesn’t really exist. Envision yourself letting go… and just floating.