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Let's start with a quote from Michael Singer^[1]:

To get some distance from this, you first need to get some perspective. Walk outside on a clear night and just look up into the sky. You are sitting on a planet spinning around in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Though you can only see a few thousand stars, there are hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy alone. In fact, it is estimated that there are over a trillion stars in the Spiral Galaxy. And that galaxy would look like one star to us, if we could even see it. You're just standing on one little ball of dirt and spinning around one of the stars. From that perspective, do you really care what people think about your clothes or your car? Do you really need to feel embarrassed if you forget someone's name? How can you let these meaning things cause pain? If you want out, if you want a decent life, you had better not devote your life to avoiding psychological pain. You had better not spend your life worrying about whether people like you or whether you car impresses people. What kind of life is that? It is a life of pain. You may not think that you feel pain that often, but you really do. To spend your life avoiding pain means it's always right behind you. At any point you could slip and say the wrong thing. At any point anything can happen. So you end up devoting your life to the avoidance of pain.

We often focus on trying to change people's minds, or making sure our plans go accordingly. The unfortunate truth, though, is that we often are trying to change what is beyond our control. Why worry about what is beyond our reach? It will always figure itself out. To have an idea of how events should go is to set yourself up for failure, because it is impossible to ensure that it goes your way. It's best to let these thoughts go. How do we do that, you may ask? Well, you can read more about that on my other blog post here.

[1] Singer, Michael. The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself. New Harbringer Publications, 2007.