Collect All Your Worries in a Box

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Collect All Your Worries in a Box

(discourse : Swami Sukhabodhananda)

On a pleasant, cool night, everyone in the apartment block had gone to bed after a nice dinner, and there was absolute silence. Early in the morning, the police came with a search warrant for carrying out a search operation at Apartment No.6. Their announcement about this was followed by a gunshot. 

Hearing all this, a person sleeping in the building next door got up shivering, His wife tried to calm him down. Finally, the police arrested the man in search of whom they had come and went on their way, but the man in the neighbouring building was still scared. Finally he decided to confess his fear and asked me, “Why am I feeling so fearful and scared?”

I explained to him in a comforting tone that fear is the absence of love. One has to bring light of love to the darkness of fear. You can’t do anything with darkness directly.  You can’t destroy it by action of will or throw it away. You have to bring the light of love.

“But my wife is a loving person,” he said.

 “Your wife may be a loving person, but are you receiving and validating that love in your heart? The flowers are beautiful, but the question is whether you are receiving and validating it or are you lost in your worries,” I asked.

You are no longer sensitive; you are highly sentimental, reacting to what is, from the framework of your likes and dislikes.  Being sensitive is being available to experience “what is” as what is. Most people are living a shallow life; they are not living and thinking deeply. If you live a shallow life, you will fail to see how you are limited by your wants, conclusions and prejudices.

“Do you mean to say, one should accept life as it comes and not change it,” asked the man. I said, “More than accepting, see things as they are. Be free to see what is, and in that freedom one is not bound.  When you see it, then you see the elegance in imperfection and from that space you will do or act on what is needed. This will not be out of conflict but out of harmony.

 

I said to him: Whenever you worry or have fear, write it down and put it into an imaginary box and stop worrying. Let us call this box as the ‘Friday Box’. Every Friday, open the imaginary box, scan through the written worries and see how you can solve it. But in-between don’t worry except to write down any new fear and put it in the imaginary box.

The following week he came to me and said, “It certainly works.  Most of my worries and fears have been solved but still there are about 25 per cent existing. What shall I do?” I said, “Put them also into an imaginary box that you will open only on the last Friday of the month; till then do not worry about it. Open that box once a month on the last Friday and scan through the worries. You will find that most of them will be solved if one stops worrying”.

Apply the technique of one to twenty. Write out 20 ways to solve your problem. Then, apply those ways. If you are calm, most of the problems will be solved, and if you are creative, any remaining problems also will be solved. Any problem remaining unresolved even after all these will make your life humble and challenging.