Worry about this one big problem

Acharya Prashant
2 min readJul 5, 2020

Following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Questioner: Sir, how to come out of stress, worries and anxiety?

Acharya Prashant: The stress, the worries that you keep, are all petty worries. They are like the worries of the man caught in a burning house, and trying to save his shirt. And he has a thousand worries, because in the burning house there are many shirts, many trousers, utensils, a lot of homely and worldly stuff.

What this man lost in his attachment for miscellaneous stuff, is forgetting is that he must have a single objective; instead of entertaining multiple small worries, he should take on one humongous worry. Saving your shirt is a small affair, saving yourself is the real deal.

But look at your condition, your mind is occupied with a thousand things in the burning house, the one thing that you are not bothering about is — saving yourself. So if you want to get rid of several worries, take on one, single, big worry.

That alone would help.

Man is born in a battle field, man will have to deal with challenges.
Now it is upon you that which challenges you choose to deal with.

One could either fight several, miscellaneous, petty, worthless wars that cannot be really even called as ‘wars’; call them ‘skirmishes’, ‘squabbles’.
Or one could devote himself to the One, mighty project that befits life.

And if you are not committed to that one, single project, then it is obvious that your time, attention, energy will all be dissipated in a thousand directions. You will not even realise, and life would bleed out of you, like a man who has a thousand cuts on his body, bleeds to death.

None of those thousand cuts might be significant enough to cause you deadle harm on their own, but taken together, they are fatal.

Watch the full video here.

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Acharya Prashant