Don't be too good!

Christmas is over and many of us have made New Year’s resolutions with the intention to improve ourselves and our lives. We may dream of purity, of perfection, and we start to eliminate all the things from our lives that we consider as being bad. Once I overheard a woman saying; “I’m now totally addiction-free, I even stopped drinking coffee and tea.” I think she didn’t realise that wanting to be totally addiction-free can be an addiction as well. So many people today seem to be obsessed with being healthy. Of course it’s important to look after our health! But health is not only about nutritious food and exercise. It’s at least as much about the way we think, about our attitude to life.

There is a lot of anxiety and fear in that chase for perfect health and eternal youth, and anxiety and fear are not good for our health, physical and mental. Are we forgetting to live whilst preserving ourselves for the future? And when is that future? - Why are we so terrified of getting older, of dying? I think that the fear of death is strongest in people who are not living a full live. We are too scared to live, we are scared stiff. Every day we are bombarded with scary news: this makes us ill, that gives us cancer, doom and gloom everywhere. We live in fear and get paralyzed by it. We don’t try new things, we don’t take a risk, we don’t enjoy ourselves, we don’t trust our bodies and their self-healing powers. We may life a very “pure” and structured life and become more and more rigid, and we stagnate. We do not grow and develop as persons, we try to stop the river from flowing and catch all the water of life behind a dam, to save it for the future... If we strive for perfection, in any area of live, we are bound to fail. That critical inner voice that keeps telling us that we are not good enough will never be satisfied and can drive us into depression.

So, don’t be too good, too pure and “clean”. Cut yourself a little slack, allow yourself to live and enjoy life, and let others live and breathe. The middle ground is where life is!