a meditation on control
Think of something you’re trying to control. Someone who hasn’t written back, a number you keep checking. Notice what the wanting feels like and where it sits in your body, and the discomfort of not being fully in charge of it.
Now imagine this thing wasn’t in your life. You never met the person. The number was never yours to check.
Consider that the feeling of wanting would still be there, attached to something else. A repeating pattern. Another situation to fix, another outcome to hold on to, the same sense that things aren’t in your hands.
So it isn’t about this particular thing. Underneath is the control program, always reaching for something to hold, and finding it wherever it can.
Let your attention rest on the feeling in the body, without giving it anything to hold.
We can be in control or out of it, and like it or not.
Making your own decisions. Running your own day.
Being looked after when you’re sick. Letting someone else drive.
dislike itEveryone waiting on your decision. Holding the trip together.
An authority you didn’t choose. Being told what to do.
As children, someone else decided when we ate and when we slept, and when they did it well, it was a relief. Part of us still wants that, and part of us pushes back against any control we didn’t agree to.
It doesn’t always look like control. Sometimes it’s needing to be right, or fixing someone who didn’t ask. The other side is quieter, saying “I don’t know” so someone else decides.
Every square is the same program. Sometimes it wants the controls, and sometimes it wants someone else to have them.
The program is busiest around other people. We know how their day should go and how they should feel about it. A friend shares good news and we’re already telling them what to do with it. Even good advice, given from that place, lands as pressure.
Without the program behind them, the same words land differently. People find their own way more easily when nobody is pushing.
We can’t guess our next thought. It turns up on its own, and only afterwards does it feel like ours.
Most of what we do works the same way. We step back from a car before deciding to. We drive home without remembering a single turn. Plans fall through, and things we swore we’d never do, we sometimes do anyway. The past is already finished, however much we argue with it.
The control the program reaches for may be thinner than it feels. We still make plans and choices, and there’s no other way to live. But we can hold them more loosely, like a guess.
When the program eases, nothing falls apart. The person writes back or doesn’t. The number moves or it doesn’t. Things go about as well as they would have, with less strain.
To have without possessing,
do without claiming,
lead without controlling:
this is mysterious power.