How To Live with the Uncontrollable

Sometimes, things happen TO us. That's a hard truth to face. We all do the best we can to deal with what arises. Sometimes our best - the way in which we cope with hard things that happen- causes suffering for ourselves or others. If we are able- if we have the insight and courage to see the need and the means to find assistance- we get help.

Telling someone who is ill or injured, someone who has been raped or beaten, someone who has lost a child or encountered real cruelty, that they must have "chosen" this, isn't about empowering them. It's about trying to reassure ourselves that what happened to them could never happen to us, because we would never "choose" it.

Telling people who have borne great injury that they are "playing the victim," is about blaming them for things beyond their control, or telling them that their wound "should" have been healed by now. Sometimes we don't have the resources to listen. Let's own that- acknowledge our own human limitations- instead of making it about the other.

We control very little. Which does not mean that we don't have choices- although a real choice is one we can see and one we can make because we have the inner and outer resources to act upon it.

I can't tell from the outside what your inner resources are, so I cannot know what real choices you have. We can support each other. We can share our stories of finding and developing new resources with which to expand our choices- but we cannot give ourselves or others "control" over life.

The Grandmothers of the dreamtime told me years ago, "Trying to get control is always driven by fear." Sometimes, when we see ourselves desperately trying to get ourselves or others under control, we can recognize that we are afraid and invite the fear to show itself, can hold that fear with some tenderness.

And sometimes we can't. Sometime unconscious dread has us by the throat and terror has us paralyzed or frantically on the run.

This is not an argument for giving up. It's an appeal for kindness toward ourselves and others. It's a plea for compassion.

Courage is getting out of bed each day just as we are, knowing the vastness of what we cannot know or control, and finding a way- our way, which will look a little different for each of us- to fall in love with what is over and over again.

~Oriah "Mountain Dreamer" House (c) 2017