Context overload

The hut stood quietly in the middle of nowhere. For some reason I find it less crowded of late. Maybe people aren't just finding time to see the Guru. I sat cross-legged on the floor, staring at the Guru as he sat on a slightly elevated platform. He had a benign smile as he waited for me to open up. 

"Let me ask you something," I said finally. "What exactly is stress?"

"Why do you ask?" the Guru said. "Are you stressed right now?"

 "I guess I am. I feel a kind of pressure... not physical, but constant. Expectations—from work, family, the world—pressing in from all sides."

"Someone poking you physically all the time?" he asked with a hint of mischief.

"Of course not," I said, laughing softly. "It’s just... everything that needs to be done. The deliverables at work, the fear of failure, my children’s future—it all weighs on me."

He looked around the hut, then back at me.

"But right now," he said quietly, "it’s just you and me, sitting in this small hut, in the middle of nowhere. Where are all these other things coming from?"

I opened my mouth to answer, then stopped. I didn’t really know. They were simply there—floating somewhere behind my eyes, heavy and shapeless.

The Guru smiled knowingly.

"You are loading your mind with things that are irrelevant to your context," he said. "Your stress, at this very moment, comes from things that have no place here. Your present context is just this—two people, a hut, a quiet valley. Nothing else exists."

"I suppose that’s true," I murmured. "But isn’t that how it always is? Those things are always... there."

"Only because you invite them," he said gently. "Don’t load those things now. Right now, they don’t matter. Even when you drive back home, they won’t matter. At best, they deserve one or two percent of your total time in a day. The rest is just life."

I frowned. "But what about their consequences?"

"They don’t exist now," he replied.

"They will exist if I don’t handle them now."

He chuckled. "You can’t handle what doesn’t exist."

"I meant—if I don’t prepare for them."

"There is always effort to be made," he said. "But effort has its time. Handle them during that one or two percent of your day. Not now."

I fell silent. The afternoon heat was sweltering and yet I felt a cool breeze inside the hut. 

"So," I said at last, "in computer terms, I’m loading libraries that are irrelevant to the program... and then wondering why it’s running slow."

The Guru smiled. "Whatever that means. I am ignorant of such things"

"Well, I suppose I understand what that means now. Thank you, Guruji."

He closed his eyes, his voice low and unhurried.

"Don’t overload the context."

The silence that followed felt lighter somehow—like a program finally freed of all unnecessary code.