How To Resolve Resentments

I’ve had some pretty awful experiences in my life – my first wife left me and took my twin 2 year old daughters with her more than 30 years ago. That was not what I wanted.

Twenty years ago, after following a calling to be a pastor in the Lutheran Church of Australia, and completing four years of difficult study under financial stress, I was rejected for ministry by the church without any explanation whatsoever. That was not what I wanted either.

But heck, I’m not dying from pancreatic cancer as Randy Pausch was at the time he gave his last lecture. Who am I to complain when Randy lost his life – something he didn’t want!

Randy stopped whining long ago about his experience and started living. That’s not to say he didn’t have bad days. I imagine he and his wife had many difficult moments when they faced their grief of a lost life together; when they faced the fact that their young children would not have a dad. But they picked life up and moved on for their children, for whom they were so grateful.

I did the same. When I was feeling down recently, my wife Karen, said to me, “Hey Mike, everyone needs something to do, someone to love, and something to look forward to. We have it all.”

She’s right, you know. How often do we get caught up in trying to get what we want – sometimes at any cost. Many of us exert so much energy in taking on someone or something we feel is ours; our right or entitlement. And when we don’t get what we want we get angry or anxious and experience bodily reactions that cause us ill health.

There is a cost we have to pay, either for the life we want or don’t want.

I think we get to want what we want in life, unless, like Randy, we do something with what happens to us. For example, if we want to be miserable we will get to want to be miserable, unless we take ownership of our situation and work on it. If we want joy, riches, and happiness, we will get to just want those things, unless we take action steps to reach our goals.

Each has its cost. If we can let go of the concept of ‘cost’, and therefore of wanting, and move into present moment awareness where there is only living, we will have abundance.

In any event, it seems to me the cost of being miserable far outweights the cost of being happy and yet many of us choose to be miserable because we only get to want what we want. It’s a paradox – We actually pay more to be what we don’t want to be. We get trapped in the habit of “wanting” and lowered self-esteem instead of leveraging on the resources we have to live full lives.

We have become preoccupied with wanting.  Instead of getting those things that we want in life, we simply get to want them.  It’s a vicious cycle. How do we break the cycle of ‘wanting’ and move into the cycle of ‘abundance’.

Public figure, Deepak Chopra, argues that we must put our intentions (our needs or what we want) out into the universe and become detached from them. By being detached we are free from wanting—free to take action steps that result in the progressive realization of worthy goals.

I agree with Deepak. The difficulty lies is in letting go of my ‘wants’ and continually measuring their cost, so that I can enjoy present moment abundance.