Why Can't Things Just Happen?

I like to remind people, whenever they're waiting for something — whether it's a hospital queue, online shopping, food delivery, or even red lights at the intersection — that everything takes time. Especially if it's at a higher stake: say, a job interview result.

However, that enlightenment doesn't apply to me. I can be the most rational person when it comes to giving advice or helping my friends make important decisions — be patient and look at different perspectives, always. But when it comes to my own, I fall into a trap and become a victim of wanting things to just "happen".

Hypocrisy at its finest, you would say. I wish I had a better explanation. My advice can still mostly be applied to the given circumstances. But one thing I haven't told you is that humans are designed to overthink and be control freaks when it comes to our future.

Unless you're the Buddha, I think most of you can easily relate to what I'm saying.

Even then, hypothetically, if Buddha were a middle-class person trying to make ends meet and had bills to pay, I think he would have ended up like most of us, too. (No disrespect intended)

So to say, humans are patient…as long as it's not their own life on the line. I tell my friends not to fixate on the job interviews or medical results. Meanwhile, I refresh my email every waking minute and anticipate every call and get annoyed when the call is just a salesperson trying to make me subscribe to their products.

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Let's circle back to the Buddha. And if my education didn't fail me, he didn't just suddenly attain enlightenment right away after seeing sickness, old age, and death around his palace. He had to work too — in fact, it took him 6 years to experiment trying to starve his way into awakening, only to abandon the extreme ideas and opt for the good old classic "Middle Way" instead.

You could say he did the A/B testing, and the experimental group was not a success, so he came up with the new middle way campaign.

Still, during the new method, the Buddha sat through 49 days of fighting his demons and temptations before finding peace — that translates to almost 2 months of intense meditation without YouTube and Netflix, and barely without any company at all.

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Things never just happen. It took us millions of years to get where we are today. And if even the Buddha had to wait 6 years and 49 days for his breakthrough, maybe I can survive a few more days or weeks of something (especially important) without losing my mind as well.

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And even after we've learned this, we will still be refreshing our Gmail and anticipating the good things to finally come to us the same before this article.

Because we're just humans. Overthinking is how we've survived generation after generation — planning for the best and preparing for the worst.

And it's not going away anytime soon.

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Honestly, I still think the Buddha would have struggled in today's world too, but that's a different topic for a different day.

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