“The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is there’s no ground.”
Chogyam Trungpa
Your life, your shot at an existence that only you can ever experience, cannot be lived under your attempts to control it.
Life goes on, but ours will not. We were born, we will experience unknowable moments leading to outcomes out of our control, and then we will die.
My mind doesn’t react kindly to this reality.
I distance myself from experiencing the moments of my life in pursuit of safety from these truths. I wrap myself in the security blanket of my Self.
“Fear of death leads us to try to control our experience and to cease truly living, seeking validation for a calculated existence instead of love for an honest one.”
Pema Chodron
I have deluded myself with a feeling of control over my life by choosing predictable paths toward certain validation, instead of choosing to live my authentic life exposed to insecure acceptance of my actions. I have wielded invulnerability as armor against uncertainty, avoiding connection with and compassion for the people who share the moments of my life.
In my flight from the certainty of my eventual death, I have in too many moments chosen death in life.
Control is not possible. In its pursuit we might achieve a fleeting feeling of safety by reducing our presence to an imitation of living, followed by more and new forms of suffering. So long as we choose to believe in and pursue control, we will suffer.
Reality has graciously smacked us awake to the uncontrollability of our world. We should not lull ourselves back to sleep in a new cocoon of transient security. Choosing to remain awake means embracing the moments of our uncertain (but certainly finite) lives without the fear that distances us from genuinely living.
If we receive each moment as it is, we can experience reality without the anxieties of what brought us to this moment and what might be required of us in the next. By loosening the hold of these anxieties, we release our thinking and acting in each moment from the burden of expectations to align with stories we (and others) have written for our lives. We permit ourselves to genuinely be as we are, without the responsibility of seeming any other way.
We drop the responsibility of achieving some future outcome effected by our momentary actions, permitting intuition to inspire our reactions to the moment. We grant ourselves the freedom to fully contribute our unique selves to the world, freed by the release of expectations to openly act naturally in each moment.
We can leave behind the isolating dream world of our egos and wake up to what is real in each moment of our short lives.
Embracing reality opens us to vulnerability. Only when we can live with vulnerability can we connect authentically.
Uncertainty and impermanence are the great levelers of humanity. By fearlessly accepting these facts for ourselves, we open our eyes to see ourselves falling through the air together with no ground in sight.
We achieve happiness and connection through becoming comfortable with uncertainty. We achieve peace by experiencing and accepting each moment as it is, and then fully and openly contributing ourselves through our actions in that moment.
This is the middle ground between pursuing control and abdicating it to some higher power. You release the goal of control in exchange for moment-to-moment self-actualization, while releasing your self from the self-imposed burden of achievements.
You experience moments without bias and realize peace through the application of your attention and energy to the world. Without judgment you learn from outcomes misaligned with your intents. Without anxiety for unknowable impacts you act as you deem best in the moment.
“We only control what we don’t trust. We can either control our selves or love our selves, but we can’t do both. Love is the opposite of control. Love demands trust.”
Glennon Doyle
Opening and contributing to the moments that make a life is the choice of life over death in life. Letting go of control over our lives is how we create lives filled with happiness, connection, and peace. This is the ultimate expression of love for ourselves; not as the individuals we mistake ourselves for but as the interconnected beings we have always been.
We have deluded ourselves in pursuit of unrealizable control for too long. It has isolated us in misery.
Life is, and perhaps will forever be, too complex for us to meaningfully understand, much less begin to control.
Enabling our sense of control requires willfully donning blinders to what is clearly beyond our grasp. We choose not to recognize the infinitely interconnected reality within which our finite experiences coexist.
Disabling the pursuit of control from controlling and limiting our lives enables a collective reimagining of our potential as intelligence beings interconnected with a wildly complex and uncontrollable world.
Our invented isolation, self-imposed misery, and increasingly capable means of self and system-destruction threaten to collide in a catastrophic way without an intervention.
I propose an intervention by way of cognitive reinvention. We can focus our attention on knowing ourselves as we really are — in Alan Watts’ words, “an organism functioning in terms of the whole environment, with the whole environment, instead of this fully little separate personality.”
My parents came of age amidst the space race, in which collective imagination (mostly fear) was harnessed to pursue grand technical challenges. We now face grander mental challenges with far greater physical consequences.
Our future requires us to change worldviews, not worlds. Instead of investing our attention and energy in sending us off our planet, I suggest we invest in creating, within each of us, the foundation for a new era of common humanity. (We really ought to call it “the headspace race”.)
Let’s waste neither this current crisis nor our lives. Let’s use this moment to awaken and never return to our stultifying slumbers.
Let’s embrace the uncertainty in our beautiful and brief lives, let go of our desire for control over lives in which we can create joy, connection, and peace, and enjoy the fall together.
