The egoic mind argues with life. It’s in a big hurry usually. It creates a sense of time and the sense that there isn’t enough of it. One of the ways it does this is by pretending that something could or should take less time, which of course is a lie. Things take as long as they take, and there is usually nothing we can do about it—and sometimes they take even longer than they usually do: People are late, traffic is slow, we’re out of an ingredient when we’re cooking, someone interrupts us with a phone call. The egoic mind doesn’t even accept things taking as long as they normally take, so any delays are especially cause for complaint. The mind compares whatever is going on with either an idea of how it should look or an idea of how it looked in the past, and thinks it should comply to that idea or memory. But life doesn’t work that way. The mind just doesn’t accept how life works, and that causes us a lot of stress—if we listen to and believe our thoughts.

What if with every little and big thing in life we just let it take as long as it takes? It’s going to anyway. Not being okay with how long something takes is a source of ongoing, subtle suffering that most of us live with without questioning it. But we don’t have to live with a sense of pushing, hurrying, frustration, anger, and dissatisfaction if we see that we are creating that unpleasant experience with the perception that something shouldn’t take as much time as it does. Notice this as you are going about your day. Notice how dissatisfied with daily tasks the mind can be. And yet such tasks must be done: We have to drive to get somewhere, we have to brush our teeth, we have to pay our bills. We have to do the many things that make our lives work and run smoothly.