Relaxation Is A Habit
Dear Youth,
Have you ever made a mistake that had a great impact on your life and ruined your future plans? Did the consequences of your bad deed leave you with a broken soul? Did you fall in the habit of torturing yourself into believing that no amount of amnesty would erase your mistake and make you forget it? How hard was it to make up for it, to apologize for it if apology was called for? Were you ever left feeling depressed?
That’s no relaxation, is it not?
Dear youth,
Have you ever been offended in your life? And worse, by someone you thought was honorable? Did you seek to revenge yourself and turned evil just like your offender? Or did you hold grudge, and resented the person, making yourself miserable in the process? How hard was it to finally forgive? And what about reconciliation, or like many people do you too believe that it depends on an offender’s attitude? Did you find it easy to forget, and of course if you are able to answer this question your answer is undoubtedly no? What will it take for one to completely forget an inhumane crime done to them? How does it feel to always remember a torturous and a painful moment of the offence done to you?
Surely that’s no feel of relaxation, is it not?
What then is relaxation? How does one define it in this typical life we live today that teems with pain and injustice? What’s more, how does one make it a habit?
In simple terms relaxation is the power of letting go of the pain brought by your inability to forgive and to accept, thus it changes you and makes it hard to move on. It is not a weakness of tolerating cruelty. But it is retrieving your control by letting go of memories of the things or of an unchangeable situation that has hurt you in the past. For instance, when we lose our dear loved ones to death, and over period of time we decide to move on with our lives and no longer stress ourselves thinking about them they way that we did while the pain was still fresh in our hearts, we are simply choosing to let go of the fixed situation we can’t change, and which is to bring back to life our dear dead loved ones. By choosing to move on we gain control of the situation and we become more relaxed. Surely it does not change the situation. But if we were able to rise the dead back to live surely the late Maya Angelou and Robert Frost (two of my favorite inspiring authors) would be alive now.
By continuing to carry the burdens of our bad precedent situation into our future like they’re sacks of dung, and unable to see that the value of what has happened lies in the lessons learned, we miss out on the new habit of using our past as fertilizers to fertilize new growth and prospect. Life will always stink for us and we will have no relaxation.
Relaxation is not the absence of tension. It’s the handling of the worst possible tension. It’s giving yourself a chance to live again against all odds: to be able to accept what has happened, to go through the situation, to embrace the pain, to deal with the situation and then move on, you are relaxed.
You may not fully return to the psychological state in which you were before going through what you went through in life, but there is a better version of you after passing through the refiners’ fire. It goes not without painful sensation to be refined, it never will. But perhaps it’s for the best, you be the judge of it.
Relaxation is a habit. It’s a damn good one if you want to survive and be victorious in life. And rest assured that good habits can be formed.
Ah-Liang TE