How to be Okay, even when you're not okay.

We as a culture, as a people, as a tribe—especially in the U.S.—have created this cult of stuff. Not just physical stuff, but also ideas of what success means. What kind of car we need to drive. What we need to have in order to be happy. How much money is enough. All of it.

It’s something that is, indeed… I’m not going to say it’s possible to be happy without any money—because we have to do things like take our pet to the vet when it’s sick. It’s very difficult to be happy if you don’t have a certain amount of money and resources and essentials like that.

I am saying, though, that for all of that stuff—for all of the things we have built as a society, as a culture, as a country (the laws, the infrastructure, the banking system, credit, everything…)—it can create tremendous unhappiness in our lives.

In fact, it can be the primary source of unhappiness:
Fear about losing it.
Attachment to it.
Worrying about the future.
Regretting the past.
Building whole stories around our relationship to stuff, or our lack of it.

But in any given moment, you can take a break from that.

You can take a break from all of the concerns about stuff.

Because for all of those things—those systems and structures and expectations—those things do not generally carry immediate, pressing urgency. Not in the moment.

You can take a break.

And it can be just five minutes in the morning. Or five minutes at night.

You can meditate. You can find guided meditations. But it doesn’t even have to be that big of a production. If you just take a little time for yourself—to disengage from everything in culture, everything about the society we’ve built—and take a minute for yourself…

No catastrophe will happen.

It will be okay.

And I think you deserve that break.

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