I didn’t realise frustration was such an old and familiar emotion with all of us, until I recently spotted my 3.5 month old son Prithvi repeatedly trying to roll on his side. Determined to lie on his tummy himself, he kept manouvering himself to his side and then would lie there trapped on top of his arm, and scream. Initially, I thought it was pain, and quickly placed him on his back, but soon realised, those were not the cries of pain, but of intense frustration. Someone clearly wanted to lie on his belly himself, and somehow the time just wasn’t right for him to reach that stage.
And though we may not remember our days of infancy, I’m pretty positive all of us drove our mothers batty when we screamed in frustration when we couldn’t crawl beyond a closed door, or were not allowed to gnaw on the remote control. Frustration runs deep in all our veins. Decades later, when we find life isn’t working according to the way we planned it, or something we want badly somehow eludes our grasp, or someone we care for just isn’t getting our point, we feel the very same frustration don’t we? The only difference is we scream silently within.
Behavior theorists define frustration as an obstacle blocking satisfaction of a need or goal. Which works as a common precursor to anger, stress and in some cases escape, withdrawal or apathy. And research has revealed that the people who depend on external circumstances to bring them joy and accomplishment are more prone to frustration, than those who take more responsibility for their lives and have learnt the beautiful lesson of letting go.
In the words of Barry Ellwyin Jones “Letting go can be the most terrifying experience we can have. Letting go means having no support mechanism for our egos. Put simply, when we let go, we trust that everything is going to work out in our best interest even when we are in the middle of a frustrating experience that screams out to us to hang on.
Sooner or later, we become so tired of hanging on to our misery and our frustrations that we just give up. And strangely, that’s when help arrives. The letting go experience becomes like a free fall, like trust exercises of falling backwards into other people's waiting arms. Momentarily there is fear and total lack of control, but then helpful and safe hands support us as we land
So if one of the key secrets to relieving us of our daily frustrations lies in letting go, then I wonder how the Universe teaches babies? My answer arrived this morning, when I saw little Prithvi roll over on to his belly effortlessly, without a screech. Perhaps the time was right, or perhaps he learnt how to let go, long long before I ever did.
