There are times when we can be swamped by an overwhelming feeling that we don’t have enough time to do all of the things that we are responsible for doing. It’s as if there will never be enough time in the world to get to all the tasks in front of us. What’s worse, many of the tasks are things that we would not have chosen for ourselves but seem to have been thrust upon us by someone else or by circumstance. What can we do to get to a more peaceful state of mind?
What we need to do is to recognize that the feeling of being overwhelmed is just the way we are perceiving our situation right now. It is only loosely related to the actual reality of the way things are. There are some days when we might be extremely busy but we feel energized and look forward to a busy day of getting things done. There are other days when we might actually not be as busy but we feel reluctant to work and worried that we have too much to do. This shows us that the way we perceive a situation is its dominant feature in the mind.
If we want to become more peaceful, therefore, it would be more efficient to devote some of our energy into training our mind to be aware of and accept whatever condition arises rather than spending all our time trying to chase after the perfect arrangement of work/life balance. If we learn how to be mindful, work/life balance arises naturally by itself to replace our feelings of boredom or stress because of the power of present moment awareness. Simply bringing the mind to what we are doing now will show us that the situation we are facing is actually doable if we would only take it one moment at a time.