Making Peace With Not Knowing How It Ends

I am not certain when I developed the relationship with control that I brought into my adult life, but by my mid-twenties in Goa I was sufficiently identified with my ability to plan, anticipate, and manage my circumstances that any situation that resisted those capacities produced an anxiety that was disproportionate to the actual threat.

I was not a controlling person in the interpersonal sense - I was not trying to manage other people's choices. I was controlling in the internal sense of requiring a clear picture of how things would unfold before I could be at ease in a situation. I planned extensively. I ran through scenarios.

I stayed in my head during experiences rather than in the experiences themselves because my head was the place where outcomes could be managed. I was at a yoga retreat at 28 - which I had planned in considerable detail - when an instructor said something that I had heard before in various forms and that landed differently in that particular moment: the need to control outcomes is proportional to the fear of trusting the process.

I had a specific relationship with that fear, which I sat with over the following days, and what I found was that my need for certainty was not really about the specific situations I was trying to control.

It was about a deep and old discomfort with the possibility that things could go badly in ways I could not prevent. The control was not preventing bad outcomes - outcomes are not responsive to the amount of mental energy spent anticipating them.

It was providing the illusion of prevention, which had its own cost: I was fully engaged in the management of an imagined future and only partially engaged in the present.

The gradual release of this - learning to set things in motion and then attend to what was actually happening rather than to what might happen - has been one of the more significant quality-of-life changes of my adult life. I am not certain what will happen with most things that matter to me.

I have become somewhat more comfortable with that. The comfort is not resignation. It is the particular peace of not spending your energy on what is not yours to determine.