Faced with circumstances we find undesirable our first instinct is typically to resist. We rarely see the obstacles in front of us for what they are: independent opportunities to learn or gather new data. Confrontations, disagreements, and mistakes can all be abundant sources of useful information—if we do not take them personally.

When we can see everything that happens to us as a sign or nudge or catalyst for change, every experience is acceptable; there’s nothing to push away.

This philosophy is easier applied to a flat tire than, say, discovering a trusted colleague has been talking shit about you behind your back. But in both situations your response should be the same: as quickly as you can, move on. The event or exchange you’re upset about has already happened. Feeling overwhelmed, offended, or angry won’t take the nail out of your tire or change the fact that Frank told Lisa he thinks you’re arrogant and overpaid.

Instead, get curious. As soon as you can, ask yourself: What am I missing here? What can I learn from this? The story you’re telling yourself about the situation is being filtered through the single lens of your perspective, colored by your emotions, flavored by your expectations, and shaped by your assumptions. Honestly, when the thinking process is done, how reliable is the accuracy of that narrative?

Keep in mind, too, what you’re feeling right now is simply your reaction to the previous moment.

Even our present feelings about the future are the result of past thoughts. We feel only that which we continue to carry with us; everything else will stay where it is dropped.

Caught in a reactionary loop of emotions, we lose access to the wealth of new information coming in—our current attitudes solidify, our beliefs become rigid; we tune out, we shut down. We close.

“Do not let anything that happens in life be important enough that you’re willing to close your heart over it,” Michael Singer wrote in The Untethered Soul. “Honor and respect the situation, and deal with it. By all means deal with it.”

That said, a solution that involves resisting, denying, blaming, or avoiding responsibility is not a solution at all, but simply a more active form of avoidance—in other words, of closing. I hate to say it, but way more often than we’d like to admit, the quickest, easiest, cheapest, safest, most-permanent solution to the problem at hand is to forget about it and focus on something else.

If the issue absolutely requires your attention, or cannot be solved without your intervention, you’ll know it soon enough.

When we take things personally, when reality isn’t aligning with our expectations, we are bound to close. When it feels safer to be right than it does to be free, we close.

Despite the number of people who are closed most of the time, or are constantly opening and closing without even noticing, this is not our natural state. Under optimal conditions we default to open: to giving love and receiving new information. It’s just that we have gotten so used to being closed, we don’t realize how uncomfortable it is, how constraining.

“You are limited only by your ability to stay open,” Singer wrote.

This state is nearly as hard to describe as it is to embody, despite my persistent motivation to do both. I know I don’t want to close. But there are still times I watch myself doing it—sometimes all of a sudden, but usually little by little.

Just as a few drops of oil can contaminate a gallon of drinking water, a flash of self-righteous anger, fear, frustration, jealousy, or anxiety can pollute the mind and convince the heart to close.

It’s easier than you might think, to be in various stages of closing for years without realizing. For many this can feel like a dull, lingering sense of dissatisfaction, apathy, or frustration. For others it’s hell on earth. The experience isn’t always painful, but it is often disorienting. And while many of us struggle to grasp its root cause, few of us are not eager to escape it.

“The tortoise on his back feels no suffering,” Seneca wrote, “but he is restless because he misses his natural condition, and does not cease to shake himself about until he stands once more upon his feet.”

Our natural condition is open. And, whether we’re conscious of it or not, this is our greatest ambition, our deepest desire, the purpose of our lives. When we’re truly open, there’s no nagging tension, no underlying agitation; there’s only a deep sense of curiosity: a desire to learn greater than our fear of making mistakes.