To wake up and Leave the Impossible

What does it mean to wake up? It is the art of seeing the reality of things, in yourself and in others, objectively, and not through the prism of your fears and desires.

To wake up is to become aware of your possibilities and limitations, to put these possibilities to use and leave aside the limitations, to see whether or not a specific problem has a solution. If the problem has a solution, find it; if it has none, forget about it. To wake up means to realize that what is done is done it is useless to beat your head against a wall.

To wake up means to become aware that you are torturing yourself with nightmares that are pure fantasy, that what you are afraid of is not real. It means to realize that you are exaggerating, that you are magnifying insignificant things out of proportion and that, in your head, you are trying to hide mere suppositions under a glimmer of truth.

To wake up is to know that dreams are only dreams to know where reality ends and illusion begins. It is to know that everything will pass, that nothing will remain here, that everything is transitory, precarious, ephemeral. It is to know that sorrow follows joy just as joy follows sorrow that here on earth there is nothing absolute, everything is relative, and what is relative has no importance or is only relatively important. In short, to wake up is to know that you are asleep.

Extracted from the book “From Suffering to Peace” by Father Ignacio Larrañaga