1. Don'T Miss Your Life!

A small story:

Mullah Nasrudin was well known for his memory, really for the lack of it. He could never remember anything for any length of time. One day, he decided to do three things after he got home. So, he tied three knots in his kerchief as a reminder of the tasks. Back home, when he looked at the knots in the handkerchief, he remembered what he wanted to do. He tackled the first two of the tasks immediately. He could not recollect the third task. No matter how hard he tried, he could not remember what the third knot was for. He stayed awake the whole night trying to remember it. Early in the morning, he remembered what the third item in the list was: he had planned to get a good night's sleep!

This is how we live our life. We are caught in the lifestyle, we miss our life.

Understand the difference between lifestyle and life. Everything we see on the outside: material wealth, success in jobs, possessions, fame, prestige, pride, and friends are all a part of our lifestyle. Even our education system is geared to foster this lifestyle. We are taught to reach a potential, a goal. We work hard to reach it and keep it. Holding it and chasing the material wealth of the world and maintaining a standard of living is hard. All our energy is drained and spent or redirected towards lifestyle. We worry about outward appearances.

We have forgotten that we have a deeper relationship with ourselves, our being, which is far more important. Lifestyle is all about getting a bigger and better bed, while life is about the quality of your sleep. In our pursuit of a larger bed we forget to increase the depth and quality of our sleep!

Why do we bother so much about lifestyle? Because we know nothing about life! We give so much of importance to lifestyle to substitute what we lack for in life. Lifestyle is a poor substitute for life. We have become proficient in adopting lifestyle into all aspects of our life. Lifestyle is found in the spiritual life as well. In the spiritual world, lifestyle refers to rituals. If we are too engrossed in rituals, we miss the whole point of spirituality.

We must take time to meditate and connect with the being in us. This is the only way we will learn to live our life. Otherwise we are fooling ourselves by chasing lifestyle.