Where does anxiety come from? And how do we face the feeling of inadequacy?

Let us begin with a question almost no one asks: has anyone, at any point in their life, not believed in the possibility of a better, fuller version of themselves? Some believe it for a moment. Some believe it their entire lives. What both have in common is this — they are human. And for the cosmos, our entire lifetime is but a single moment anyway.

This is where anxiety is born. It is not weakness. It is not disorder. It is the psychological discomfort of knowing, somewhere deep within us, that our existence is brief. We brush against this truth and flinch. That flinching is anxiety.

But anxiety has another root, equally important: the failure to see the essence of things — 不解万物，看不到本质. We assume we see clearly. We do not. We barely see at all. The essence of eating, of sleeping, of working, of speaking with another person, of our own nature — these remain largely invisible to us. We move through life skimming the surface of everything.

Now consider the phrase 能力不足 — inadequacy, insufficiency, not enough. Society treats this as failure. But what is it really? Human capacity is infinitely small relative to the boundless energy and potential of the universe. From nature’s perspective, all human ability is equal. The judgment of inadequacy is not a natural truth — it is a social one. And society is made of people. People who cannot accept inadequacy in others are, at root, people who cannot accept it in themselves.

能力不足，不到 — this arrival, this sufficiency, is always relative. Your arrival and mine are necessarily different. Your path and mine, and the paths of all living beings — how could they ever be the same? So inadequacy does not describe failure. It describes difference. The moment you see this, something in the heart opens.

What then can we actually do? Not just believe — though belief matters deeply — but practice. To feel relationships with the heart. To observe our thoughts, emotions, and sensations without judgment, without needing them to be other than they are. And this is not a practice reserved for quiet moments. It is a way of moving through everything — every meal, every conversation, every ordinary act of being alive.

As for suffering — the Buddha said it comes from desire. I say it comes from wherever you need it to come from. Name it in the way that sets you free.

When you love yourself, others, all living beings, and the world — genuinely, without self — you will find that the energy available to you has no end.

You are smaller than the universe and larger than the verdict. Both are true.