Creative Guidance-IASbaba, Inspirational & Educative Articles
Art of Letting Go:
You have to know when to quit. If you have grown up in an environment where quitting is considered negative, you would have not appreciated the importance of knowing when to quit. Most people suffer, struggle and waste enormous amounts of time being in the wrong place just because they don’t know when to quit.
Let us understand a few important things before learning the art of quitting. There is enormous ego satisfaction in struggling. In fact, struggling is the food of the ego; it simply loves the whole idea of striving and struggling, even if the point of which is futile. If you do not understand this craving desire of your ego to struggle, you will eventually become a victim of it.
Most people simply love the idea of struggling; hence they pick up difficult and challenging things to do, without ever questioning if they actually possess the necessary interest, ability and skills to accomplish what they have picked up. Since the ego loves a bigger challenge, it simply jumps into it.
For most, only a bitter failure will teach them this lesson of learning how to quit. Quitting is not a bad thing, especially if you base it on sound reasoning and scientific understanding. Quitting doesn’t mean failure; it only means that you chose something you could not accomplish, it is time to move on to something else.
As much as it requires courage to pick up a big challenge, it takes even bigger courage to know when to quit. It is a subtle art, mastered only by carefully observing yourself. Each and every individual possesses a natural talent and affinity towards something. If you ignore this inner desire and simply go on picking up various challenges to satisfy your ego, you will end up nowhere.
The problem is, when you study the lives of successful people, you almost always study it from the outside. From the outside, everything they are doing seems to be a struggle because you are not actually experience what they are experiencing. There is a totally different internal reality at work here.
Let us take a simple example of playing soccer. When you watch a soccer match from the outside without knowing much about it, all you can see is strife, struggle and effort. What else is visible apart from the enormous amount of effort put in by the player to constantly keep running behind a ball that doesn’t seem to like him? But for the player himself, the reality is something else. He is enjoying the game. For him it is not a struggle.
This is where it is extremely important to understand the difference between passion and ego. While passion makes everything simple and easy, ego makes everything hard and difficult. Know what you are chasing; is it your passion or ego? Always choose to do what you are passionate about, or try and bring passion to what you are doing. If you cannot do either of these, then learn how to let go.
“The articles are a copyright of The Ahamo Movement and IASBABA.”
