Is it worth it?
One of the wisest pieces of advice you have heard in life is to choose your battles, don’t fight over everything. It’s pretty easy to get angry over small things like your cat messing up your bed. What we don’t realize about this habit is that it messes up your inner peace. It can start as a small complaint about an issue and then end up being part of who you are.
Life has numerous battles but the good part is we are not meant to fight all of them. Recognizing which are for us and which aren’t, has to be the best therapy we can give our minds. Sometimes we expend our energy on battles that are not ours. It’s even worse when we find ourselves fighting other people’s battles. The mind can’t take all of that, what’s going on in your life is enough to fill it, you can’t have space for everyone else.
In the TV series For The People, Sandra Bell, a lawyer on a case about a boy named Mohammed Fayed is confronted by her boss Jill after a heated interrogation with a witness in a court hearing. Jill clearly tells Sandra, “The mistake was getting baited into a battle. This is war and you have to pick your battle…..and know your enemy and right now your biggest enemy is you. You wanna fight everyone about everything, and when you fight about everything you fight about nothing”.
That part caught me particularly because countless times we start arguments over very little things like what someone said 1 year ago or your neighbor who gave you a bad look or a delayed text reply. And don’t get me wrong, there are things that are worth being brought up for clearing misunderstandings. Weighing out what is more significant than the other is a skill that is essential in life not just blowing everything out of proportion.
At times our greatest enemy is ourselves, we engage in battles not realizing we fighting ourselves.
Severally we get baited into this habit by the need to prove ourselves to others. It’s pretty easy to want to show that we are more than what they may think or that we can stand up for ourselves, but, we have to sometimes think if the energy we are using up by letting our minds get consumed by every little battle is worth it.
Is the battle you are fighting improving you or doing the contrary.
