How to Fight the Fatigue of Life!

My new clinic is situated in Østerbrogade 142, 1tv.

From Global Psychology
A very successful and stressed businessman on the verge of mental breakdown had some sessions with me regarding his life, family, and his view of life. While talking with me, he realized that he was infected by monomania. It was the idea that success through hard competition was his way of becoming admired and recognized. This idea has driven him so far that he was on the verge of losing his family, his high spirits, and his health. As he was used to draw quick “strategic” decisions, he started to read literature about being in the here and now and about the new trend, “a simple life.” As these views constituted antidotes to his own lifestyle and promised relief from his monomania, he was willing to embrace them right on the spot.
I said to him that living in the “here and now” was no guarantee for peace of mind, neither for a pervasive feeling of living fully.
In the West, I told him lots of people live in the “here and now,” following their impulses and sensations, becoming obese or hedonists, self-exposing and talking parrots, not thinking of the long-term consequences of their behavior. I know too lots of people who try to catch the “here and now” by meditation and yoga, which are good techniques of “catching one’s breath and learning to relax and thus make new priorities.” Meditation and yoga are “instruments” that can be used in order to get balance into one’s system. Later on one can harvest the fruits of hard labor by achieving this balance. To get to the stage where life is more than an endless FIGHT or WAR gives place to other possible changes in one’s life.
The point is that even in the “here and now” state alone, there is not enough mental and spiritual fuel for human beings who wish to accomplish something beyond their self-realization since we are basically ambitious and wish to excel, experience, or create something new.
The mental monotony, repetitious rituals and procedures, and long-lasting “peace of mind” may grant people something that they value, but may cost them in daring to challenge life premises and in the feelings willing to fight for something worthwhile. I say sometimes to some of the disciples of mental balance, and I admit it is a cruel statement, that the Dalai Lama has all the peace of mind a person can attain, but he has not regained his suffering homeland, Tibet!
Only when we are really challenged, or we challenge ourselves, with much at risk, with great tasks and goals, with our backs to the wall, we really feel what it is to be fully alive. For example, fighting for a great purpose, for a vision greater than our own navels, which is what the second part of this book is about, is not synonymous with simple life or meditative state of mind, which tend to be inward focusing.
As the past had formed our views of life and ourselves, and thank God, we can modify them both, so the present is essential for our feelings of being alive and engaged, with its challenges, necessities, and imperatives. Yet our future is also an important part of our lives because in it we place our dreams, hopes, visions, plans, and challenges, which keep making us alive.
If I was to choose my world, I told my client, the successful businessman who wished now to live a “simple life” and in the “here and now,” in accordance to your new priorities, I would lose all the great challenges, grandeur, and high peaks of life awaiting me, and I will eventually lose my soul to life’s ordinariness. Fighting for something greater than myself and my little navel is always the task of heroic hearts in the present and in the future. As expressed by the poet Alfred Tennyson so beautifully in the poem about Odysseus coming home and being bored by daily life:
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,—
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.