Are you capable of stopping when you are winning?

“It does not matter how well you played. It matters when you stop.”

This is the quote from a movie I watched on Netflix: Lucky Bhaskar. It is a fictionalized movie about an actual crime in India by Harshad Mehra, who scammed the banks into giving him loans.

What he means by that is that things like greed do not have a limit, but we do. We might have been winning, but ultimately, these things will result in a huge loss, so it’s better to stop. Have you ever experienced the joy of driving over the speed limit - you know you cannot do it forever, so you enjoy it while you can and then stop. It is hard to get back to fifty miles per hour from eighty miles per hour, but it is better to stop before you get a speeding ticket. When you will get a speeding ticket, you do not know - and when your inner moral compass kicks in full gear or your risk-taking limit is reached, you stop.

The real question is how to stop at the right time. How do you find the courage? How do you become aware of it in the first place? Everybody has to find their own answer—for me, it is feeling the pain in my own body. What do I mean by that? I just came back from a ten-day meditation retreat - Vipassana. I have been doing it for decades - one of those things in life which is a calling and not a choice. And as a part of the practice, it becomes very clear that whenever I generate negativity, the first victim is me.

When we get angry at somebody, we have to generate negative feelings about that person first. When we are angry, many biochemical reactions occur in our body, which are unpleasant. And if we can feel those unpleasant sensations and realize the pain we are causing ourselves, we will stop. What is worse is that we do that to ourselves - another person uttered a bunch of words and left. And we got angry and kept getting angry at it. Ridiculous right? But that is what I was doing. On the fifth or sixth day, I was in my room meditating when I realized that even though it was just me in the room - I was still getting angry at other people. I was forced to face the reality that I was the source of the problem, and only I could do something about it. That is a humble pie to swallow but much needed.

I was repeating thoughts that led me to get angry, which caused unpleasant sensations in my body—and I was reacting to those, which caused them to multiply. But I needed the stillness inside to realize what was happening inside of me—and that caused the change in the external world. I am eternally grateful for the priceless teaching of Vipassana meditation.

Just one more note: We cannot control what thoughts arise, so if somebody says something to us and we have an angry thought, we cannot stop that. But, what we can do is build the muscle that lets us observe the sensations within our body and observe then instead of reacting to them - and this is true for both good and bad thoughts. The goal here is not to express or suppress but to Observe.

I realized that I had been getting angry at other people for far too long, and it was time to stop. I also know that there will be ups and downs in life, and I will start playing the game again, but the important thing is to stop playing when the awareness kicks in. Keep on building the muscle to increase the awareness to stop playing when it hurts.

Can you stop playing while it may feel as if you are winning?