Losing Control
My life is going through another shift. I hate shifts. I like control. I am the kind of person who reads an ending of a book before she decides to continue or quit. I am also the desperately hated spoiler hunter. Suspense, I don’t like it.
Hence, I like to know what is in front of me before I step forward. This doesn’t always work out…obviously…because life has a way of getting in your way…as it should. It’s a time I am also learning about navigating my way around really negative people who share the same planet as me.
When faced with people who don’t see things the way you do also makes you lose control. So, that’s what I am talking about today. About the control we need, the certainty we seek, and the relinquishing of it.
I read a story about how someone who was trying to care for her mother, who was suffering from the final stages of cancer, suffer a tumor herself. As she watched birds swirl overhead as she took calming, meditative walks, she felt her life reeling out of control. The room she prepared for her mother during her recovery from cancer treatment was unnecessary because her mother ended up in a nursing home. She herself became bedridden after treatment from her own medical care. Everything she thought she had control over went…out of control.
While she thought she could care for her mother, she couldn’t. While she thought she was in perfect shape, she wasn’t. While she thought her employer would fire her, they didn’t. While she thought she had an iron-clad plan, it wasn’t.
There is a saying that goes ‘Anything you can’t control is teaching you how to let go’ and I’ve never really thought much about it until in recent years.
Such is life, a friend would say. Not so, I would argue back.
You see, when that happens, life has a way of forcing you into a corner not to distress you but to help you see something you did not or refuse to see before this. When you have no other choice but to breathe, believe, have faith, and let go, you will. You don’t have to like it but you will.
It is also during this time that your resolve and resilience will be tested. So will your patience. It’s during those moments that you let go that you will find yourself soaring or sailing with the wind. Whatever direction the wind brings you, you let it.
We all have a belief system. We believe that life should be this way when we do A and B. It’s mathematical.
If you treat your friends well, they’ll be nice to you. If you are kind to strangers, others will be kind to you. If you lend money to your family, they’ll favor you and return you the money. If you are good at work, your effort will be valued. That’s why we make plans. We form strategies to tackle life’s difficulties based on what we believe the outcome should be like.
Therein lies the problem.
Sometimes life is the shits and have other plans for us.
Staring Down Death’s Door
Everyone’s got one life, we all know that and yet, when we’re young and unaffected, we rarely spend a moment thinking about death. We know it’s there and the possibility of dying from riding a roller coaster is real. But we do it anyway because we know the risk is low. We’ve done the math in our head and positivity got the better of us and we hop onto the roller coaster ride anyway.
We also believe that if we try hard enough, we can delay or beat death at its game.
When my cousin and cousin-in-law were diagnosed with cancer, we thought nothing much about it. Sure, we were sad, cautious, nervous, curious, anxious but we were more or less thinking to ourselves, ‘Nah, we’ve got this. We’ve got to believe that good things happen to good people. We have to have faith and listen to what the doctor says. As long as we do our best to stay alive and positive, we’ll beat it’.
Sometimes we’re wrong.
Both of them did not survive cancer.
It shakes your faith when that happens. It’s hard, even now, to even believe that difficulties and disappointments like these happen for a reason and are blessings in disguise. How are we supposed to say family members’ deaths are blessings? In what way?
We have to remember that blessings don’t always make themselves clear right away. They often become visible only through time. The answer to our innermost questions will only reveal itself if the answer is relevant to us.
Closed Doors
The story moves on…closed doors. When the writer was on the road to recovery, doors closed in her face. It came from people she least expected it from so, she found herself catapulting back into the abyss of depression. People stopped answering her phone calls and emails. Family members stopped dropping by. Her boss pulled the rug from under her feet.
The semblance of control she had during trying times seemed to have folded itself over.
I was also reading the ever-so-famous book, The Easy Way to Stop Smoking, by Allen Carr (I am still reading it), but something struck me at the beginning of the book. He was insistent on the fact that giving up smoking was easy and no matter how many times we are reminded of the fact that smoking kills us, smokers don’t quit because of it. All threats and scare tactics will fall on deaf ears and blind eyes.
His argument is that what keeps smokers from quitting smoking is the FEAR of not smoking. The fear of withdrawal symptoms, the fear of not fitting in, the fear of being stressed out. It has nothing to do with smokers LOVING the act of smoking. In fact, smokers HATE smoking and know they should stop but don’t because of fear.
Smokers need to believe that there are absolutely no advantages to smoking before they’ll quit. They need to sit down and ask themselves why are they lighting up a stick of cigarette and suffocate themselves before it works.
No government, health body, or good samaritans can do this for anyone except for the person itself.
It’s another form of losing control. When we run out of cigarettes, we get a carton from the airport in case we run out. Because imagine if we don’t have cigarettes left when we need it. In fact, ask any smoker and they’ll tell you an unwritten rule between smokers — never take a fellow smoker’s last cigarette.
Have you asked yourself why?
For me, I thought I was doing pretty well in terms of work and family. Despite being divorced, I stayed civil to my ex’s family, I’ve remained in touch with his family, and I’ve trained myself to behave like an adult even when we did not see eye to eye on things.
We’ll just have to walk through it in a mature manner. We’re not dumbing down our discussions into locker room fist fights and kindergarten-like squabbles or name-calling. We’ve both goth to take our individual high roads.
But then, one day, out of nowhere, a door closed in my face. I was no longer the family member I thought I should be. As it turns out, my insistence on civility may have been an inconvenience for them after all. It was a slap in the face.
My first reaction was, of course, indignance. Then anger. Then retaliation, hatred, regret, shame, blame, and the thought of revenge.
At the end of the day, I’ve also come to realize what a blessing that was. I am no longer expected to do the things I was doing. I was free. They’ve effectively freed me! The only scary part of that was finding out what I should now do with all that freedom; is it a bad thing?
The disappointments stung, it continues to sting to a certain extent, but it gave me space to consider many things — what’s happening right now and what my intuition is telling me. I have to ask myself not how to react, but how to properly respond.
Sometimes, despite our most earnest efforts, life don’t turn out the way we want it to. That’s the reality of life. The sooner we accept this, the better. Only when we come to a place where we are mindful of our thoughts without reacting to them on impulse would we be able to avoid the shackles of hatred and other draining emotions.
Do not react to our whims when we feel like inflicting pain as revenge
I am sure I am not the only person in the world who has ever been betrayed by a friend, lover, family, boss, business partner or co-worker. We’ve all been there at one time or another. So, I am sure you’d understand where I am coming from when I say the first reaction you’d have when you feel betrayed is that you want to hit out the person who has betrayed you.
As deeply and excruciating as possible.
But as Deepak Chopra pointed out on Oprah, the tactic doesn’t work because it tends to boomerang its way back to us to make us feel horrible as a person, and then swallow us with guilt. If it doesn’t, for those who believe in karma,it’ll come back to us in one way or another so, I’ve never really indulged in such unhealthy fantasies. I walk away.
Even then, walking away can be viewed negatively depending on who you’re dealing with.
When you feel sad, allow yourself to feel sad, not self pity. Don’t believe a word of what your brain or heart is telling you when it tries to paint yourself as a victim. And don’t magnify those feelings. When you allow them to flow through you (not avoiding them altogether or escaping from them), it goes away.
When you stop running, it stops being scary.
Instead of going back to the bygone pages that is soon to become a phase of your life, keep your heart fixated on the future. As soon as you find yourself hurtling backwards towards the past, keep focused on positive possibilities in the future.
It’s true when they say when a door closes, another opens because if you looked at it positively, you’ll see tracks in my life you didn’t realize you needed or were there before. For some, the doors remained sealed shut until the shitty thing happened. All of a sudden, the door was open.
For one writer, it happened in her mid twenties. She lost her job and got dumped around the same time. The vast, dark cloudy sky looked intimidating. It looked empty and overwhelming at the same time. It was filled with a million glittering stars and yet stark naked at the same time. The good news is that as scary as her future looked, it gave her time to focus on what’s really important to her — her teaching career (something, she’s put on the backseat for a long time) and her family.
Sometimes our brain seeks out proven strategies. We formulate ideas based on what has worked before and our experiences. We have preconceived ideas about how things should work out logically based on what we believe in.
When faced with such difficulties and we finally accept the notion that you can’t control everything, it’s deeply freeing. All of a sudden, you DON’T have to control ANYTHING. Like whitewater rafting, going with the flow and let it sweep you away.
If you let go, you’ll be ready for it. Because there’s nothing to control.
Marsha Maung is a professional copywriter, content producer, blogger, SEO specialist, digital marketer, mother, and most of all, a human. To find out more about what she does for a living at www.MarshaMetta.com, or if you want updates on her personal blog, hit it and let’s connect at www.marshamaung.blogspot.com. Mantra: I try. I try all the time and I refuse to stop because I think it’s important.
