Control is an illusion. Actually, everything is an illusion, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I’ve struggled with emotional regulation essentially for as long as I can remember. Somedays (like today) when I am really challenged I start down one of many unhealthy spirals. Sometimes I catch myself and sometimes not. Sometimes friends and loved ones catch me, that happened today. I was starting down the spiral of feeling ashamed that so often I feel that I cannot control my emotions. They just run through me like executable code or a loud scary movie. But when I shared this with my wife she calmly replied “nobody really controls their emotions”. That helped. That limited my swirling downward into shame and thus more dysregulation and then more dot dot dot.
I searched on the word “control” in the summary file I have of all the posts I have written or plan to write. I was sure that I must have written about the mirage of control before. Apparently not, how odd. Maybe it is just too obvious to me. But then again I write about other things that are obvious to me. “Obvious” with the caveat that all that I know is that I don’t know anything. And that is on a good day. After all we are all just bozos on the bus.
Control, safety, permanence, altruism, duality, there are so many illusions out there.
I remember over the summer out on the trail I overheard a couple young ladies talking about their boyfriends. One said something to the effect that “…..he just always has to be in control.” I was unable to not share with them the lightning bolt that went through my head upon hearing this innocent off-the-cuff observation. “There is no such thing as control” I offered as we passed. They both laughed. It is fun being an old guy on the trail. The trail is where I feel most me, most at home, most beautiful.
There is so much comfort and release in accepting that control is an illusion. The same deep body-exhale that I get in accepting the impermanence of everything including me. I guess we are all impermanent and eternal as well. Everything is connected. Everything is energy. Energy just changes and gets recycled and sometimes appears as a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or Hulk Hogan. Neither are any more real than control.
I think I really understood this many years ago and then forgot it. I cannot imagine that I did not feel the truth in this understanding of control’s illusory nature when I was a young father. Toddlers make herding cats seem, well, like child’s play. I vividly remember the painful experience of learning that I could not keep my little toddler completely safe as she crawled through life sticking things in her mouth and trying to wander into traffic. I wonder if my daughter at that young age thought about control. If anything she controlled me more than I controlled her. Nothing really has changed 🙂
