Learning to lose control can be route to freedom
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Northern Drift by Monique Sliedrecht
Life can be very unpredictable. Just this week, a 7.6 level earthquake hit western Japan.
In November last year Icelandic authorities declared a state of emergency after hundreds of small earthquakes shook the Reykjanes peninsula – the island nation’s most populated region.
All people could do was read the signs and prepare accordingly. The volcano finally erupted after weeks of intense earthquake activity, spewing glowing orange jets of lava.
On a lesser scale, we’ve had some very intense wind storms in the north of Scotland so far this winter. At the height of Storm Gerrit, the wind was whipping furiously around the house, and I was glad for the safety of being indoors, but one of the few trees around my home was torn in two by the winds. Thankfully it did not land on anything important, though I’m sad about the tree.
Natural events like these can leave us feeling very vulnerable. These are situations we cannot control, just as we have no control over other aspects of our lives, like the past or the future, agonising bereavements, sudden unemployment.
We cannot control the behaviour and attitudes of others. We struggle with this and want to be able to manage our circumstances, as well as our goals, plans and all our relationships.
We try to create certainties in an uncertain world and we are, by nature, people that take comfort in the ability to manipulate our environment. But the most significant events lie well outside our power to control.
Life happens. And it’s wise to adjust our own thinking. We need to be flexible and open to the fluidity of experience. In this very moment, we can be grateful that we are alive and breathing, that there are things we can do now to take care of ourselves and deal with uncertainty.
A large part of life is acceptance and learning to let go. This is perhaps one of the most difficult things to do. We need to accept that we don’t have control over everything.
The ability to live with a degree of uncertainty is important for our emotional stability whilst the attempt to micromanage is the enemy of peaceful living. This does not mean being passive because there are so many good things we can do in our lives, but it does mean accepting the things we cannot change and the wisdom of knowing the difference.
Learning to ride a bike and learning to swim involve letting go. The more we try to control these activities, the more difficult they are to do. This goes for a lot of areas of life as well.
Perfectionism and controlling behaviour are a kind of tyranny. We need liberation from such oppression, which often comes from deep within – and from far back in our childhood. We all know this about ourselves and we see it in other people.
What if we learned to embrace the unforeseen changes and treat them as opportunities rather than hindrances, rather than hang onto a blueprint of how we think things should be? Could we perhaps begin to shift the way we approach all things in life, accepting that, ultimately, we are not in control?
Of course, this is counter-intuitive for most of us, who can identify with the flattering courtiers who tried to persuade King Cnut to command the waves of the ocean to retreat! We are not given such powers as human beings. But we are given the ability to adjust our own reactions, to accept what we will never be able to control.
However frustrating or frightening this may feel, the ability to allow each moment to wash over us, free of expectations and open to the unexpected, is the stuff of a rich, fulfilling life.
- Monique Sliedrecht is an artist and blogger based at Freswick. If you want to follow her writing or sketches, go to her blog at www.moniquesliedrecht.com
