Thoughts on quality of life

We are immortal souls, and earthly life is just one of the many experiences of our existence. We have already incarnated on Earth, walked our paths on other planets, and existed outside of dense physical form. The history of our soul is far more vast than the memories available to us within a single incarnation.

Before coming to Earth, every soul draws up a certain plan. It chooses qualities it intends to know and master through direct experience. These qualities are called soul virtues. Among them are love, compassion, forgiveness, acceptance, the ability to let go, the capacity to maintain trust in uncertainty — and many others.

Among people who are searching, feeling, awakening — the same inner question comes up again and again. Why am I constantly being shaken? Why does my life go through upheaval every so often, throwing me into crises, into rethinking everything, into inner resets, into the need to reassemble something, change it, reprogram it? And most importantly — why do people around me seem untouched by all of this?

They live the same way year after year, go to the same job, earn modest money, don't ask deep questions, don't search for meaning, don't go through powerful inner transformations, and don't experience spiritual crises. They simply live — and the system leaves them alone.

We believe the bad things that might happen to us with surprising ease, and we find it very hard to admit that things could turn out far better than we are used to thinking. Why does our imagination work so willingly for fear, and how can we learn to direct it toward creating the life we want?

There is one interesting feature of the human mind. We can spend hours picturing events that never happened and may never happen. Replaying unpleasant conversations in our heads, agonizing over possible losses, fearing mistakes, predicting other people’s reactions and mentally living through failures that exist, so far, only in our imagination.

The tighter you cling to what you want, the more tension you create around getting it.

I’ve noticed that the problem often isn’t the desires themselves but the importance we give them. At some point an ordinary “I want this” turns into “I have to get this, or I won’t be happy.”

We have gotten used to treating life as if something is always wrong with it. It seems we need to work on ourselves a little more, sort out the past, fix our character, get rid of our fears, earn a certain amount of money, repair our relationships, find our purpose — and only then will we finally be able to relax and feel happy.

But a year passes, then another, then a third. Some problems get solved, and new ones appear in their place. We become wiser, more experienced, more aware, and yet the feeling that real life is still ahead of us somehow never goes away.