It isn’t true? You sleep, you wake up, you eat and, at some point, you go back to bed. The sun rises and the sun sets without your contributing to it.

“Life is easy. We humans make it complicated.” I first heard this from Dr. Glenn Matthews, a great American psychologist who retired from Bangkok, Thailand.

It took me a while to fully understand the depth of this statement.

I grew up in Germany. In a culture that seems to advocate retirement as the ultimate goal of life. We Germans go through a full education to get a good job, and then work as hard as possible until we reach retirement in our mid-sixties. Then real life begins, and only then. Before that it is a struggle, and there is little time to enjoy life.

The problem is that once people reach retirement age, they often can’t physically enjoy life as much as they’d like. And of course many do not even reach this age. Like one of my classmates who died at the age of 29 in a bus accident in Turkey.

My last seven years in Thailand turned out to be a great learning experience. Thais live for the moment. It’s like the other end of my German roots. Often when a Thai person encounters a problem at work, he will leave the job overnight. They don’t worry much about the future, and their amazing networking capabilities ensure that someone is always looking out for them, somehow.

Buddhist monks teach us how little we need to live. And, in fact, it is no different in Christian belief: “Look at the birds of the sky, they do not sow or reap or gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them.” -Matthew 6:26

If life is really so easy, why do we humans make it so complicated?

I once met a lady from Bhutan. I don’t know much about Bhutan, but I remembered that this country ranks first in the world happiness index. I asked that lady why she thinks this is so. Her response was as simple as it was shocking: “I think we want less.”

And that is probably true. Aren’t unfulfilled desires the key to all suffering?

“Those who seek security pursue it throughout their lives without ever finding it (…) The attachment to money and security only creates insecurity, no matter how much money we have in the bank,” writes Deepak Chopra in “The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success.”

I admitted that I am not a very spiritual person; years of natural science education may have contributed to that. However, the moment I understood Deepak Chopra’s concept of ‘detached participation’, I fell in love with it and it broadened my mind. Today I apply it successfully in my life in the following way:

I am an ambitious person. I enjoy pursuing goals (for example, becoming the best trainer I can be and adding great value to my clients’ lives). But I have learned that happiness does not depend on achieving a specific result. Happiness comes from what you are doing while you are doing it.

If, for example, your goal is to achieve a certain goal in five years and you allow only to be happy once this specific result is achieved in all its details, then you are practicing attachment. You are setting yourself up for trouble. Perhaps over the next five years you will not be happy because your happiness depends on that goal that you have not yet achieved. Worse than that, no matter how hard you work, chances are you won’t achieve your goal. Or you succeed and realize that, in fact, it is not the source of happiness. Wouldn’t that be sad and a terrible waste of time? This is how you make your life really easy, very complicated.

Find the source of your happiness and do what you have to do to be happy now. Find the middle path of the Buddha, engage (act and do your best) while practicing detachment (be independent of a specific outcome).

Enjoy the ride and achieve happily.