It’s interesting how much pain and suffering occurs in the space between how you think life should be and how life is.
So when a colleague sends a rude email, you moan and groan, complain to your spouse and overall dread replying.
Why?
Because people aren’t supposed to be rude, at least not in your eyes.
You believe that people should be nice and polite and considerate to others.
And this spicy email flies in the face of that worldview.
Continuing to fantasise about the perfect job/partner/world is causing frustration in the real world.
As Oliver Burkeman said in his book ‘Four Thousand Weeks’:
“Some Zen Buddhists hold that the entirety of human suffering can be boiled down to this effort to resist paying full attention to the way things are going, because we wish they were going differently”
Thomas Duggan 