Are You Taking Life Too Seriously? How to Find Joy and Inner Peace

In This Article

• Why taking yourself too seriously gives away your peace.
• How life is more like improv than a scripted play.
• What two monks can teach us about letting go.
• Why joy requires releasing yesterday's story.
• Choosing peace instead of drama, one moment at a time.

A friend the other day said that I don't take life seriously. It was not meant as a compliment. But I, on the other hand, do see it as a compliment.

I think too many of us not only take life too seriously, but we take ourselves too seriously. We feel insulted, hurt, angry, or resentful by things people say to us or about us, or by things people do or don't do.

As an example of this, another friend relayed that because of something someone had said, his whole day was ruined. In other words, he took a person's words of criticism so seriously that he did not enjoy the rest of his day. He went about his day in a mood, carrying resentment, anger, frustration, and whatever other emotions the conversation had brought up.

Now, from my perspective, he took that other person's opinion way too seriously. If something that somebody else does or says ruins your day, or worse, your life, you're not only taking it too seriously, you're letting them be the arbitrator of your life. You're letting that person have the final say on what is right or wrong for you.

You're letting them decide if you're going to be happy. You're letting them decide if you're going to live your life with an attitude of positive expectation or carry a load of gloom and yucky energy from a conversation or event.

Now that is taking life too seriously.

I like to compare life to a play. And not only that, it's an improvisational play, something we make up as we go along. It's not a play with a written script that we follow word for word. It's a play that we make up line by line, act by act, day by day.

And just as in improv, one person can throw a monkey wrench into it and try to shift the energy toward anger, fear, or negativity. But it's up to each person to choose their next line, their next reaction, their next direction.

Do I Take Life Seriously?

So, do I take life seriously? I try not to.

It doesn't mean that I don't care about a lot of the situations going on. It doesn't mean that I won't do my best to help in any way that I can. But it does mean that I will not let it rob me of my inner center of peace and love.

Years ago, I made myself a promise that nothing was worth my peace of mind. In other words, nothing said to me or done "to me" was worth taking me out of the peaceful center within myself.

Does it mean I never get angry? Of course not. I get angry. I get impatient. I get judgmental. All these things that we experience as citizens of planet Earth. However, what it does mean is that I choose to let go of those things as soon as I become aware of them, or as soon as I express them.

When I find myself impatient or judgmental about someone else's actions or words, I know that they have the right to say and think what they want. But in the same vein, I have the right to react however I choose. And because my priority is inner peace, I choose not to react with anger or judgment or whatever else. At least that's my intent.

Do I always get it right? Of course not. My belief is once we're perfect, we don't need to be in "Earth school" anymore. So if we're still here, we're still learning. And, yes, I'm still here!

I recall a dear friend, also my mentor, sharing so many of her self-discoveries over the years. The last one that she was working on before she died was joy. Her goal was to find joy in everything, to hold joy in her heart always, no matter the triggers that came her way. She must have succeeded because she's no longer with us in this 3D life experience.

What Does It Mean To Not Take Life Seriously?

Inner peace, joy, letting go of judgments and of anger and fear, etc, are all connected. All of these choices are part of not taking life so seriously, not taking ourselves so seriously.

It's interesting that when I used to act in theater, I always found comedies the hardest to act in. Dramas were easy because you would just latch on to an energy, whether it was anger or fear or whatever the energy of the moment was in the play, and you could really emphasize it, build on it, and express it.

The comedies were difficult because comedies had no intense energy that you could hang on to and project. Comedies were so much about being in the moment and finding the humor and the lightness in every moment.

It wasn't about hanging on to an energy and building it up. It was about letting go. Maybe that's why comedies were hard for me to act in. And I'm discovering the same thing about life now.

Living a life full of drama, anger, resentment, and grudges? That's easy. Because we're basically just repeating the same script over and over again, and amplifying the energy.

But, in order to live a life of joy and of humor, you have to be open to creating a new script every moment based on that moment only. Not based on he said, she said last week or last year, but based on finding the joy in every moment, in every conversation, in every exchange.

Finding the joy in sitting down and enjoying your morning coffee (or juice, or smoothie). Finding the joy in a friend dropping by, or texting, just to say hi. Finding the joy even in the confrontations with people, because they too are there to help us let go of those heavy energies and connect with the joy, connect with the love, connect with our inner peace.

Because the inner peace is always there. Sometimes it's been covered up by years of accumulated garbage, but it's the foundation of our being.

It's what you see when you look at a sleeping baby. Inner peace. No turmoil, no anger, no fear, just feeling at peace in the moment.

And that is also possible for each one of us. It exists within us.

And what keeps us from it? The goings-on of our ego-mind, whether it goes on about this ain't fair, this ain't right, this ain't whatever. Those are judgments. Those are not acceptance. Those are not living in each moment and letting each moment be not a trigger for anger and fear, but a trigger for letting go of stress, letting go of creating trauma in our lives.

So do I take life seriously? I try not to. I try to find the spark of humor of acceptance in every situation, whether the humor is at my own folly in my reaction or in the other person's action and words.

Is Your Life A Drama?

We can choose to live life as a drama, and many people do. But then those people may also end up with heart attacks, liver problems, stress headaches, and whatever else the body produces. Because whatever we experience emotionally also gets experienced physically in our body, especially if it's stuff that we hang on to and nurture, like anger, resentments, grudges, etc.

These emotions can get stored in our body somewhat like an oyster wrapping layers and layers around a piece of sand to then create a pearl. But in our case, I believe that when we keep building layers around resentments and fears and anger, what we create is not pearls, but physical manifestations of what we've been carrying emotionally.

What we carry around with us emotionally affects us physically and shows up as aches, pains, and even dis-eases. And that's another good reason not to keep carrying those negative emotions.

So my recommendation is don't take yourself so seriously. Don't take others so seriously. Don't take life so seriously.

Be like the duck that lets the rain slide off its feathers. Live your life to the best of your ability, being as kind, as loving, and as generous as you can be while remaining true to yourself.

Don't take seriously either your judgments or other people's resentments. They are simply machinations of the ego that likes to be right and that likes to think that everyone else is wrong.

Everyone has the right to their opinion. Everyone has the right to make their choices, whether we agree with them or not. But what they do not have the right to, unless we give it to them, is being in charge of how we feel about something, how we react to something.

That's something that no one can do for us. We do that for ourselves, even though we blame others for it. You know, we've all said it: he made me angry, she ruined my life, she drives me crazy, etc.

One of the most empowering realizations is that no one can "make us" be or do anything. It is always our choice. Not always an easy choice, but still ours. Can someone "make us" angry? No. They do what they do, and then we decide if we're going to get angry. Now our ego probably jumps in real quickly and decides for us. But that's still us deciding.

Can someone ruin your life or your day? No. They do what they do, and then we react however we choose, consciously or unconsciously. If we choose to go through the rest of our day feeling resentment and anger, that's on us. That's not on the other person. They did what they did or said what they said and walked away.

Why are we still carrying it? Which reminds me of a story which you may have already heard, but it's a good one and bears repeating. There are several versions of it. I'll give you my condensed version.

Two monks, sworn to celibacy and to no physical contact with women, are walking down the road. They reach a river, and there is no bridge, so they have to cross the turbulent waters on foot. There's a woman standing by the bank, afraid to cross.

So the older monk picks her up, carries her across the river, sets her down, and continues his journey with the younger monk. His silence and inner peace are undisturbed.

Several miles later, the younger monk can no longer contain himself and blurts out, How could you do that? How could you pick up that woman and carry her across the water?

The older monk calmly replies, I set her down by the river. Are you still carrying her?

So in the same way, are we still carrying the anger and judgments and resentments that were directed at us, or are we willing to let them go?

And if we're not willing to let them go, why? I would venture to say that it's because we want to be right, and hanging on to our position makes us feel that we are right and they are wrong.

But my question to you is this: Does this attitude bring you inner peace? I'd say probably not. Actually, most probably not.

Choosing Inner Peace

So if we wish to feel at peace within ourself, and our goal is to experience a life of inner peace and inner joy, then our task is to let go and not take things that people say and do so seriously.

Which doesn't mean we don't reflect on their words to see if there was truth in them, because every comment that is made to us has a purpose. Every comment is a message in one form or another.

So we can meditate on the words and see what truth they have for us. However, we can do that from a state of inner peace rather than one of anger and resentment. It's a much nicer place to be.

We can choose to get angry about all kinds of things. There's plenty of stuff out there we could get angry about. But how is that helping anything?

Which brings to mind a statement commonly attributed to Mother Teresa: that she would not participate in an anti-war rally, but she would participate in a pro-peace rally. And this is what I am urging all of us to do: make our life a pro-peace rally rather than an anti-war rally.

Which doesn't mean we don't look at life honestly and critically. But it does mean that we look for solutions rather than just harp on what's wrong. And this applies to personal relationships as well as the world situation. It's easy to see, whether in others or in the world, what we think is wrong.

The challenge is to see how to make things better. And as far as I can tell, holding on to anger and resentment has never made things better.

Maybe we need to learn to be more like our pets, specifically dogs, who will greet us enthusiastically with love anytime they see us, regardless of whether we spoke harshly to them in the past. They don't seem to sit there thinking, Yes, but remember what you said to me yesterday. They see you, and they're ready to love you again, and again, and again. Perhaps that's one of the lessons we're here to learn and emulate.

Looking for the Light Rather than the Shadows

So do I take life seriously? I try not to.

I seek to find the good in everything and in everyone. And it's there when we're willing to look. It's there even in those whom we may consider our greatest challenge or aggravation. If we look honestly, we will see that they too are bringing something positive to the table, even if it's just to wake us up to something that needs our attention.

And maybe that's what I've come to understand about not taking life seriously. It doesn't mean I don't care. It doesn't mean I don't pay attention. And it certainly doesn't mean I don't care about what happens to other people or to the world we live in.

Perhaps it means I care enough about life not to spend it carrying around yesterday's anger, someone else's judgment, or resentment over something that has already happened and cannot be changed.

The younger monk kept carrying the woman long after the older monk had put her down. How many people, arguments, judgments, hurts, and resentments are we still carrying long after we could have put them down?

We get to choose. We can carry yesterday into today and tomorrow, repeating the same old drama and the same old script.

Or we can put it down.

We can return to the present moment and see what this moment has to offer. Maybe it's a flower that wasn't blooming yesterday. Maybe it's a friend who drops by unexpectedly. Maybe it's a dog who's delighted simply because we've walked through the door. 

And perhaps that friend who said I don't take life seriously was right. I don't want to be hanging on to old stories so much that I forget to live in the present moment.

So if not taking life seriously means choosing joy when I can, choosing peace instead of resentment, letting other people have their opinions without allowing those opinions to determine my happiness, and putting down what I no longer need to carry, then I'll gladly take what my friend said as a compliment.

Life is serious enough all by itself. I choose to enjoy the play with all its twists and turns, and its surprises. Each moment is a new moment to discover the joy and the love present. We may need to look deeper than the surface to find the message of love hidden within every experience.

About The Author

Marie T. Russell is the founder of InnerSelf Magazine (founded 1985). She also produced and hosted a weekly South Florida radio broadcast, Inner Power, from 1992-1995 which focused on themes such as self-esteem, personal empowerment, and well-being. Her articles focus on transformation and reconnecting with our own inner source of joy and creativity.

Creative Commons 3.0: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License. Attribute the author: Marie T. Russell, InnerSelf.com. Link back to the article: This article originally appeared on InnerSelf.com

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Article Recap:

Life becomes lighter when we stop allowing other people's words and actions to dictate our emotional state. By letting go of resentment, embracing the present moment, and choosing inner peace over drama, we become the authors of our own experience rather than actors trapped in someone else's script.

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#EmotionalHealing #SelfAwareness #Forgiveness #PresentMoment #PeaceOfMind
#MarieTRussell #InnerSelf #Happiness #EmotionalResilience #LifeLessons