We have a tendency to hold onto shit.

Something hurtful a classmate said when we were thirteen-years-old can shape the way we view ourselves for the rest of our lives. It's fascinating, really. We can experience hundreds of thousands of experiences––most of which are truly beautiful––but we choose to hold onto the dozen or so that are hurtful, allowing them to replay in our minds until they worm their way into our hearts and callus our skin.

This begs the question: Why do we have so much difficulty letting things go? Bad experiences tend to linger like the taste of sour milk. Accidentally take a swig of sour milk once and you will remember the taste for the rest of your life. If you think too seriously about the taste now, it's enough to send you lurching for the nearest bathroom. You likely can recall where you were the first time you drank sour milk.

Drinking sour milk is an awful experience. We can all agree to that. So, why isn't it something that continues to haunt us for the rest of our lives? Because we're able to let sour milk go. We don't take sour milk personally. We don't view it as fair or unfair. We understand that it's simply a natural process that happens when milk goes bad. We spit it out. We vomit. We tell a few people about it. Then, we let it go.

We struggle to do this with other negative experiences––defeats, break-ups, firings, financial losses, road rage, disagreements, mean shit others says, etc––because unlike sour milk, we allows ourselves to take these experiences personally. We deem them wrong, awful, unjust and cruel. They very well might be all of these things but they're also one of the many natural processes of the human experience. You will experience defeat. You will have your heartbroken. You will get fired. You will lose money. You will have someone cut you off in traffic. You will disagree with your friends. You will be the unfortunate soul on the receiving end of someone else's bad day. That's life.

Living a good, peaceful life is learning to spit this shit up like sour milk, vomit, vent and then let it go.

Sour milk is unfortunate but it's not personal.