Every day I interact with other humans. There is a common theme in those interactions. It is control. Humans like to have control over things. They want to control themselves. They like to control their environment. They like to think they have control over other humans. The truth is that control is an illusion.
Hit the control key on your keyboard. See what happens, nothing. All by itself, hitting the Ctrl key does nothing. That is how much of an illusion humans having control over anything is. It is just like hitting that key on your keyboard. You cannot control anything for real. It’s all an illusion.
Don’t panic! I realize that is easier said that done. If you are spending 90-100% of your energy trying to control things, and I tell you that isn’t possible, you might feel a bit of panic. That is reasonable to feel. I would tell you not to try to control it, but that might make it worse.
I will try this instead. You don’t need to panic. We are not meant to control anything on a grand scale. We only have anything resembling the idea of control in the present moment. We cannot control the past or the future, only right now. In this exact moment, which lasts only just in this moment, we have control over one thing, our choices.
Our choices are heavily influenced by the world and other people all around us, but in each moment, we are in control of only our choice. We can choose to follow those influences or to not follow them. Whichever we choose, is our choice alone. We can blame the influence for the choice we make, or we can take accountability for choosing for ourselves. This is the only control we have, and it is only temporary at best, and certainly does not guarantee anything in terms of results.
I can choose to follow the influences in my life urging me to make certain choices, and if I do, that means nothing for whether or not I will be successful. I can go out on a limb and make choices without even considering other influences, and again, means nothing for whether or not I will be successful at anything. There are simply too many moving parts to life for our choices to be the only deciding factor in our outcomes.
Are you struggling with that concept? You know why? Because you want to believe that if you are good, if you make all the right choices, are kind and compassionate that you will draw to you a life with peace and love. That you will have abundance and success and never have to worry about anything ever again. We as humans believe that making good and righteous choices should earn us success. We have to believe that. We think we have to believe that because otherwise what is the purpose of doing anything. If it is all just random why are we trying to do anything right? To me, this is flawed logic.
Whatever choices you make, you will have the life you are meant to have. That means that if you are meant to struggle, you will, even if you make every choice with an effort to not end up struggling.
If you chose a life with struggling when you chose your human life, you will have struggles. If you chose a life with little to no struggling, where things are just easy, then that is the life you will have, regardless of the choices you make. It is what you were designed to experience. You chose it before your life began. That is why you chose your specific parents, gender, race, geographical location, economic status etc. You chose all of those things before you were born to create a specific kind of life for you. It was so that you could have certain types of experiences and be able to learn from them, or to be able to teach others with them, or both. Life is designed to be an experience, from experience, we learn and grow as a soul. Why do we do this? I am not certain of that, but it seems to be in our nature. It seems to be part of our hard wired design to experience things and learn from them. We can’t help it. I do sometimes question what people end up learning from things that happen, like I want them to learn to trust and they seem to learn to hate. That’s the part where we do not have control of anything.
Ever notice how some people seem to be having a horrible life with nothing going their way, and yet, they are the happiest people you know and seem to be at peace all of the time. Then notice people whose lives seem to have everything in them they could possibly want, and yet they are miserable all of the time. There is also every experience in between. There are super “good” people who are kind, and yet have horrible things happen to them. There are super, what seems like “evil”, and unkind humans where everything seems to go their way and they have it so easy. Again, and every option of experience in between.
We do what we do. We can control that in the instant we choose it. Then it is instantly out of our control to become whatever it will become as it connects with the choices of the universe around us. Our choice we control, the results of that choice, well, we never can control that, even if we think we did. We didn’t, not ever. There is too much evidence around me that tells me that this is the one universal truth. Because life is so interconnected and interdependent on so many varied factors out of our control, that even when we are in complete control in one moment or even several successive moments, we still can’t control the outcome. They best we can hope for is that the universe has a plan and everything works for the plan, and trust that plan.
Does that mean I can’t have a loving and peaceful existence and draw more of that energy to me? Yes, and no. You can choose a peaceful loving existence, and it is likely that choosing that will draw more of that to you, but you may or may not recognize the source for what it is. If I believe that love looks a certain way, and I choose to be love in that way hoping to receive love in return that looks like the love I am giving, I am very likely to be disappointed. Love does not look like one thing. It looks very different from person to person, and energy source to energy source. That is your, “no” answer. If you choose to love and be love in whatever way that makes sense to you, and then open yourself to receive love in whatever way the universe sees fit to send it to you, you are way more likely to receive the love you seek because you are open to it looking like anything. It might look like hate, but even hate is very close to love if you look at it from a different angle. We just need to know how to recognize it.
Sometimes that is all we are meant to learn in this life, how to see things differently. I have learned from my experiences that nothing is only what I think it is. It is sometimes not even close to what I think it is, and sometimes it is only partly what I think, and also something else.
That is where letting go comes in. The only thing you need to hold onto is nothing. How hard are you grasping at your “truth”? How hard are you holding onto love? How hard are you trying to control your work life, home life, inner life? How’s that going for you, all that “trying so hard to control something” energy?
What if instead you simply worked on controlling each individual choice put in front of you in each individual moment? Make each of those choices with integrity. Meaning that you choose your beliefs and values and make choices based on those beliefs and values as much as you can. Knowing you may not always be able to do that, just do your best because you always do. Then, release the results into the universe to manage. You can call that God if you want, or spirit, or collective soul. It is all the same thing. It is not the energy that controls life, but the energy that manages everything to be what it is supposed to be and meant to be. That is what I try to do, and oddly enough, not trying to control anything works really well to reduce my stress level, and also, things seem to be working out much better and to my liking. Not sure why that is, but it is obviously what is meant to be.
I do what I see in front of me. Life will still be what it is meant to be for us all. That is the grand design. Trust is what we are all here to learn. Trust in life being what it is meant to be, and that in all of life there is meaning beyond perhaps our understanding, but meaning just the same, and trust that to be what it is supposed to be. Just be you. That is your only job. Be you. Do your thing. The results are not for you to decide or control, just be you.
Namaste