There Are No Problems, Only Challenges

What a sleepless year after divorce taught me about peace, presence, and the stories we believe

Are you chasing freedom or remembering it?

Dear Friends,

I used to sleep peacefully—the kind of sleep where you wake up without recollection. It was effortless and so reliable that I took it for granted until it vanished.

After the divorce, my sleep pattern changed. I still fell asleep quickly, but I started waking up at 3 a.m. with sweat dripping down my chest and sheets soaked, followed by hours of restlessness and frustration.

In the morning, I was tired, groggy, and disoriented. I kept thinking, "This can't be good for my health. I need more sleep." This thought became the background refrigerator hum, this belief that my sleep was a problem that needed to be fixed.

Then, a strange realization occurred. Despite the lack of sleep, I felt more alive, energetic and happy to be alive than I had in years, maybe since childhood. And yet, I kept thinking, "Getting only four hours of sleep a night can’t be good for me. If this keeps up, I'm going to die early."

My belief didn't match my experience. There was no evidence of declining health, no dark circles under my eyes. The problem wasn’t lack of sleep. The problem was the belief that there was a problem.

That realization changed everything. Instead of lamenting the experience, I noted, "This is what it's like to lie awake at night." I stopped resisting and started relating. And that shift from fixing to facing unexpectedly altered my experience from frustration to "This is not so bad."

The Problem Is Not the Problem

In Western culture, we’re conditioned to treat life like a puzzle. If we can solve all our problems—heal the trauma, change the job, fix the relationship, perfect the self—then we’ll finally be free. But that pursuit is endless. Solving one "problem" reveals the next. The goalposts of peace keep moving.

What we call problems are often symptoms of deeper conditioning. They aren’t inherent to reality but created in the mind. The tension we feel isn’t because life is unworkable, but because we believe this shouldn’t be happening, a feeling aversive personality types are all too familiar.

The idea that freedom is our original nature presents a radical alternative. Instead of treating life as a series of obstacles, it asks us to question how we relate to experience. The Buddhist view doesn’t deny that challenges exist. But it suggests that difficulty isn’t the issue. Resistance to difficulty imprisons us and creates unnecessary suffering.

We suffer not because of experiences but because of how we interpret and relate to them. Our unease is the idea that something is wrong and that we must change, improve or fix things before we can rest.

Something opens up when we meet experience as it is without labeling it a problem. There’s no need to transcend our human messiness. Freedom doesn’t come from rising above our confusion, anxiety, joy, rage, fear or boredom, but from fully inhabiting these experiences here and now.

When Everything Becomes a Problem

For years, I believed my partner was the obstacle to my peace. If only she’d put the dishes in the dishwasher instead of the sink. If only she'd put the dog food over here instead of in front of the nuts and seeds. If only she hadn't left her shoes and slippers right before the door and stairs. The list was endless and petty yet compelling.

But last fall, I saw it for what it was: a projection. The frustration I felt wasn’t because of her but because I believed her behavior was wrong and needed to change. But she wasn’t the problem. My mind’s insistence on labeling her behavior as a problem was the hidden underlying issue at hand.

A problem demands urgency and resolution. It contracts our mind and body and insists that well-being is impossible until something external changes. A challenge, on the other hand, is a spacious invitation. It asks for our attention, not our fear. It allows us to engage without insisting we control the outcome.

This reframing isn’t semantic but transmutational. When we stop seeing life as a series of problems, we experience it as dynamic, alive, and full of possibility. We stop bracing against experience and begin to meet it as it is.

Choosing Freedom in the Present

Eckhart Tolle wrote, "When you create a problem, you create pain. No matter what happens, I will create no more pain for myself. I will create no more problems."

This doesn’t mean ignoring difficulty. It means not making hardship heavier with our stories. It means finding peace today by learning to be with what is rather than delaying freedom until everything is exactly the way we want it to be, down to the screws lining up on a wall plate.

Our sense of imprisonment is rarely due to external circumstances. More often, it’s born from how we interpret our life's conditions. Freedom isn’t out there waiting until everything is just right. It’s already in our willingness to relate to life with an open heart instead of a conditioned mind.

Entrepreneur and motivational speaker Jim Rohn famously said, "Don’t wish it was easier, wish you were better. Don’t wish for less problems, wish for more skills. Don’t wish for less challenge, wish for more wisdom."

When I stopped treating life as a series of problems, I began to see it as a landscape of invitations. Invitations to grow. To pause. To respond instead of react. To love instead of defend.

Nothing is missing or wrong. There are no problems, only challenges. And every challenge is a doorway to the freedom that was never gone.

Keep remembering,

Ryan

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