Control

Today is garbage day, and it’s a good one. I’m giving up control. Sending it away with the piles of cardboard that accumulated the past two weeks as I’ve traded in my drinking for online shopping. Actually, I never had any control to begin with, so I’m just giving up the idea that I did. 

I can move things around a little bit, but the actual placement of circumstances and experiences is not my job. You may or may not believe in a higher power, and I don’t care if you don’t. The fact is that there may not be a higher power at all, and it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we understand that we are not the higher power. 

When we make the mistake of thinking that we are more powerful than we actually are, we become unhappy. Upset that we tried so hard to make someone else happy, and failed. Miserable that we worked so hard, and nothing changed. Despondent that our hard work didn’t pay off the way we had planned, we often turn to harsh judgment of ourselves. 

Wrong target. Once we realize that all of the things outside of our own words and actions are not ours to control, we can give up feeling responsible for the outcome. The outcome is not my job. I have no control over anything once my participation in it ends. 

It isn’t my job to make you happy. Yes, I’d love to make you happy, but if my honest words and actions aren’t enough to elicit joy, it’s out of my hands. I can’t pretend, lie, manipulate or be something I’m not in order to make you happy. Your happiness is your job, just as my happiness is my own. 

Discarding the idea that anything or anyone else is my responsibility is freeing. Im doing my best, every day, with my actions and my words, and I have no control over anything else. I am allowed to be and like myself, and trust that the world around me, as out of control as it may be, will be perfect. 

So as I say adios to the idea that anyone else’s happiness is my responsibility, that I am anyone else’s problem, or that I can in any way control the world around me, I send in this weeks trash the lie that it is all my fault. Goodbye, guilt, regret, and anxiety, I don’t need you anymore. I’m just one very small woman in a very big universe and I can’t possibly be responsible for it all.

#garbageday