I don't 'blog everyday, not because I'm too busy or have nothing to say, but rather I like saving up the energy to write slightly longer posts and to say things I normally don't in course of everyday life. In everyday life, people just execute their daily duties. You wake up, go to school and/or office, get home, do the chores, entertain yourself a bit, and go to bed. Next day, lather, rinse, repeat. And the cycle goes on.

Life's like an analog clock that you have to wind-up every 24 hours. And more often than not, the clock gains or loses a few minutes every day. In a month, you could be as much as half-an-hour off the correct time unless you synchronize your clock with some official time keeper. Similarly, if you just live your life without any form of introspection and retrospection, sooner or later, you're gonna be out of sync with your own life and the rest of the world.

In other words, if you never take some time to stop everything you're doing and take a 36,000 mile big-picture overview of yourself, your life's path, your goals and dreams, then things are just gonna get tougher. If you're lost in a maze, you can forever run around every corner to find a way out but the most optimal way to get out is just look at the maze from above and find the shortest path to the exit. Everybody knows that is the best way but nobody wants to do it.

We're all in a rat race. Life has become a rat race because we're all materialistic - chasing objects that money and only money can buy, running after goals that solely bolster our egos. So now even if you win the rat race, you're still a rat. The trick is not to win the race but to stop being a rat. How can you do that? It's easy and sounds so very cliched. Take control of your own mind. Stop letting yourself be led by others. Realize that you and only you make your own destiny unless you unfortunately happen to be living under some ruthless dictator or corrupt communist government. But even then, there's a lot you can do to control your own mind. Sure you may not be able to control the fact that your dad's not a rich industrialist but you can sure control the emotional turmoil your mind goes into after the love of your life rejects you.

Control of your own mind is quite possibly the easiest and the hardest thing to ever do. It's hard because throughout our lives we have been force-fed the notion that we are all emotional by our very human nature and we are but the victims of our moods. We have adapted to feeling sad when our mind decides it's time to feel sad and we are trained to feel happy when our mind tells us so. But it's not at all hard to decide to tell our mind that shut the hell up and stop being so moody. And after that, it's all easy. Once you realize that you can tell your brain to feel calm in the most adverse of life's circumstances, you suddenly find yourself equipped with the world's greatest arsenal of strength and power - emotional maturity. Most people get stuck in life because their emotions overpower every rational thought.

I know, everyone says you gotta think straight and do right but so many people just can't. Why? Because saying is one thing and doing is another. It's very easy to say "never lie to yourself" but very hard to do. It's the wide gap between saying the nice wise quote and explaining HOW to do it, that prevents people from actually doing it. So I said above, take control of your mind. Well great quote but how does one go about doing it. What's the first step?

The first step is to stop all negative thoughts. That's it. It's a very easy thing to do once you start doing it. No matter what you're doing, something is going on in your head and if that thought happpens to be laden with negativity of any kind, be it sadness, guilt, remorse, angst, revenge, stress, worry, or anything else, just let it go. Tell your brain "hey that's a negative thought and I'm not gonna have any of that in my brain." And stop. Change the topic and focus on something else. Keep doing it every single moment, every day and every night. Very soon you're realize yourself that things just seem so much easier. Life will suddenly be easy, much more clear.

I know, all of this sounds so pseudo-wise psycho-babble but from personal expeirence, I can say it's very true. College years were quite tough on my mental stability, especially the stress of multiple degrees and multiple jobs and I always felt so lost. Lately, things have got so much better since I started following the aforementioned guidelines. None of the stuff I said above is something I pulled out of thin air. Most of this 'wisdom' stuff is from ancient Hindu and Buddhist teachings. Too many people apply the practical rituals of religion in daily life instead of following the wise teachings.

Nah, I've not suddenly become overtly religious or anything. I'm just saying, the day you take control of your mind is the day life stops being difficult. The grass really is greener on the other side because you have a lot more time to tend to your lawn as you're not stressing all day about meaningless objects.

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