Surrender
The key to feeling better is to give up. At least on all of the irrelevant stuff, which is most of what keeps our minds busy. This is the most valuable insight that I got from 2023. And as usual, the best insight came from the most mundane situation. Trying to fall asleep at night. The mind can find endless reasons to not fall asleep. A tiny bit of light. The sound of a drop in the kitchen sink. The neighbours making noise. You name it. When that happens, just give up. So simple, yet so difficult for some unexplainable reason. Of course, I am not the first one to realise this. Tons of sleep meditations ask the listener over and over to surrender. The beauty of it is that it works for everything else, too. Deep in our minds is an understanding of what we believe is right and we fight anxiously to make it a reality. Yet in doing so, we exclude the possibility of anything else being right and, most importantly, we suffer needlessly for all the things we cannot change. In 2024, choose surrender.
When the mind looks like this, just give up (photographed at Lenbachhaus)