When we see everything that happens to us as a catalyst for change—a nudge in a new direction, a sign from the universe—every experience is acceptable; there’s nothing to push away.

This philosophy is easier to apply 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.

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.

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: limited by your assumptions, colored by your emotions, and shaped by your expectations.

Honestly, when you’ve exhausted the thinking process, how reliable is the narrative you are left with?

Our current emotional state rarely reflects what’s happening right now. Often, what we think is action toward our desired future is merely a delayed reaction to past experiences, both positive and negative.

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.”

Dealing with it does not mean resisting, denying, blaming, or avoiding responsibility; these are just more active forms of avoidance—of closing. The unsatisfying truth is, way more often than we’d like to admit, the quickest, easiest, cheapest, safest, most permanent solution to most problems is simply to forget about it and focus on something else.

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

Healthy detachment doesn’t leave a wake: once you’ve let go, walked away, or set a clear boundary, you should think about the issue less, not more; you should feel immediate relief, not a lingering sense of regret.

Avoidance, on the other hand, is messy—it leaves behind an obvious residue: the topic becomes off-limits, the relationship cools, nothing blows up, but nothing changes either. Life narrows, and the range of what you’re willing to look at—what feels impossible, uncomfortable, or offensive—expands.

We mustn’t take things personally. We can’t expect reality to align with our expectations. For if we do, we are bound to close. When it feels safer to be right—to be sure, to be comfortable—than it does to be free, we close.

Every disagreement becomes something to defend against, every disappointment another reason to retreat. Gradually, we trade our curiosity for certainty, our enthusiasm for security, and our openness for protection.

And yet, 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. We’ve just gotten so used to being closed that we don’t realize how uncomfortable it is—how limiting it is.

Before we were taught to be embarrassed, defensive, or guarded, openness was our default setting. Closing is what we learned to do as children in response to pain, uncertainty, and disappointment. Pure loving enthusiasm is what was there before we learned to close.

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

I know I don’t want to close. But there are still times I watch myself doing it—sometimes suddenly, overtly, but usually little by little.

A few drops of oil can contaminate a gallon of drinking water—just a flash of self-righteous anger, fear, frustration, jealousy, or anxiety can spread rapidly throughout the mind, convincing the heart to close. Strangely, no matter how unhelpful or poisonous a thought, we still race to defend it, identify with it, build a story around it.

Most of us spend years, unknowingly, in various stages of closing. For some, this feels like a dull, lingering sense of dissatisfaction, apathy, or frustration: a subtle shutting down that rarely announces itself. Over time, we find ourselves saying yes to fewer things, assuming the worst of others, jumping to conclusions, or starting to keep score in our relationships.

For others, closing feels like hell on earth: depression, obsession, anxiety, addiction. The experience isn’t always as painful as that, but it is disorienting—confusing, frustrating. We struggle to grasp the root of our discomfort; we seek relief from a reality we did not consciously choose.

Powerlessness, while not always unbearable, is a state few are not eager to escape from.

“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.”

Once you truly commit to letting go and staying open, you will feel your life begin to flow, to move, to merge with the process of being a human on planet Earth. And the enthusiasm and insatiable curiosity you were born with will reawaken, as your innate desire to learn and grow override your need to be right and your fear of making mistakes.

To live with a heart that is open and full of love is our natural condition—our greatest ambition, our deepest desire, the purpose of our lives, whether we are conscious of it or not.

As the famed mythologist and storyteller Joseph Campbell wrote:

The goal of the hero trip
down to the jewel point
is to find those levels in the psyche
that open, open, open,
and finally open to the mystery
of your Self
being Buddha consciousness
or the Christ.
That’s the journey.
It’s all about finding
that still point in your mind
where commitment drops away.
The separateness
apparent in the world
is secondary.
Beyond that world of opposites
is an unseen (but experienced)
unity and identity in us all.