Working With Your Limited Control
What you control in life might be limited but it’s still a lot.
I don’t know about you, but it looks to me like the world has gone completely nuts. How else can you explain the results of the US election and the majority voting for the guy who plans to make their lives unnecessarily miserable?
While this is difficult to not pay attention to, it does put a spotlight on a harsh truth. You have little to no control over the world around you. You can vote, protest, act to persuade others to your way of thinking, and that’s about it. Beyond that, you have no control.
The thing is, overall, you have no control of anything outside yourself. This includes the weather, traffic, the overall environment, what your friends/family/coworkers are going to do or not do, how you will feel when you wake up, and pretty much everything else in the external world.
What do you control? Yourself. Specifically, your inner world. This presents some interesting challenges because most of what you do and can control is utterly immaterial and intangible.
Limitations, the material and immaterial
This is, for many, a bitter pill to swallow. Even the most passive people I know want to exert control over their own lives. This is possible but limited. The limitations, however, are largely wholly material.
One of the scariest elements of the election result is how much it’s all about exerting external, material control. The flow of immigration, deportation, body autonomy, the right to love freely and express yourself as you see fit, the ability to live, work, love how/where/when/why you want, and other material matters are the core of the control they’re seeking to exert.
You and I are material, tangible beings. You have a body, exist in a space, move through linear time in minutes, hours, days, months, and so on. Much of how you perceive the world is via recognition of these tangibles.
It is often hard to accept that there are real limitations to the tangible, material world. This has nothing to do with the artificial lack, scarcity, and insufficiency you’re regularly bombarded with. This is about what you can control within the material world and your interactions with it.
The biggest limitation you probably recognize is the inability to control anyone, anything, any place outside yourself. You can’t make anyone do anything, can’t bend the weather or traffic to your will, and have no power over much beyond aesthetics outside of you and your life.
The tangible, material world is fraught with limitations. Because you live in that body in this world, that’s distressing and upsetting. Especially with all the messages of limitlessness and the like.
However, limitations in the intangible and immaterial are very different and not limiting in the same way.
Recognizing your limited control
What do you control? This is not the complete list, but it’s the primary list. You control:
- What you’re thinking (thoughts)
- What and how you’re feeling (feelings)
- Your positive or negative approach to things (approach)
- Your intentions in combining thought with feeling and approach to do something (intent)
- Anything you choose and/or decide to do (actions)
In summary, you control your thoughts, feelings, approach, intent, and actions. All matters that are immaterial and intangible.
You can’t see, taste, touch, smell, or feel thoughts, feelings, approach, intent, or actions (although actions often apply the senses in one way or another). Yet you, and you alone, can control all of these.
Nobody but you is in your head, heart, or soul. Nobody else thinks, feels, intends, or acts for you. Just like you cannot control them they cannot control you. All of this is within your control.
To many people, this feels horridly limiting. All you control is you? That seems unfair, unkind, and incredibly limited. Is it? I’d argue that it’s not.
How infuriating do you find it when someone attempts to exert control over someone else? Or, let’s make it more personal – How much do you like it when someone tries to control you? I’ve yet to meet anyone who actively is okay with another person controlling them.
What, if anything, can you do?
Working with your limited control
Many of my friends are fretting over the results of the election. That’s valid. A lot of what is being planned is distressing, disturbing, and utterly horrifying. This is amplified exponentially if you’re not a white, cis-gendered male.
You shouldn’t ignore the outside world because when you do you cede what little control you have. Vote, attend the protests, stand up for the marginalized, and do what you can outside yourself with what you know.
Unfortunately, that’s all that you can do. Apart from that, and to avoid being overwhelmed by it, work with your limited control.
How? Practice active conscious awareness. Mindfulness is how you gain awareness of your thoughts, feelings, intentions, approach, and actions. If they are not serving you, you have full and total control to change them.
If your thoughts, feelings, approach, and intentions are making you miserable, causing you to feel closed off and disconnected, you can change them. That is wholly, totally, and completely within your control. It’s limited but not limited because it belongs to you and only you.
Your immaterial, intangible self is like the TARDIS from Doctor Who, way bigger on the inside. That’s because it’s made of infinite, interconnected energy with no true limits.
When you work with this you empower yourself. When you’re empowered your limitations become fewer and further between.
What does empowerment mean?
One of the core tools used by the scary people who are assembling the next administration is disempowerment. From lessening rights, removing body autonomy for women, deporting millions, dehumanizing non-binary and trans people, and every other act of disenfranchisement, disempowerment is the core. Take away empowerment and control how people live.
Since you can’t control anyone else the reverse is true. Nobody else can control you, either. Empowerment isn’t given by anyone outside of you. It is from within that you are empowered to be, do, and have all the who, what, why, where, and how of your life experience.
Empowerment means recognizing that power as presented by so-called leaders, demagogues, gurus, bosses, and the like is wholly, totally, and utterly artificial. Why? Because all external immaterial power is artificial.
However, because you and I live in this world, interaction comes with stratifications involving intangibles. Exploiting fear of the “other” and the like recognizes and sets up the abuse of this.
You have the power, via empowerment, to work with your limited control to make the most of your life that you can. How? By doing what makes you feel most alive. If that’s helping to place obstacles and roadblocks in the way the haters, do that. If it’s gathering family and making the most of the time you can with them, do that. Do things now, in the only time that’s truly real, to have life experiences via working with your limited control.
This is not selfish
A well-meaning friend recently posted to Facebook something where they explored what they were doing in light of the struggles many others are facing. Like going grocery shopping while person “X” is being repressed or walking the dog while person “Y” is fighting to be free of a tyrant, and the like. This, to me, reflects a viewpoint that living your life, here and now, in the every day, is selfish.
Maybe it is, to a lesser degree. It is not, however, genuinely, truly selfish. Why? Because you have limited control outside of yourself. Your control is mostly internal, immaterial, and intangible. Since you can’t live for anyone else you can only live for yourself.
Technically this can be viewed as selfish. But it’s not. Why? Because you’re not living with malice of forethought to take away rights, material or immaterial matters from anyone else. (At least, I hope not). True selfishness is knowingly denying someone something by taking more than your fair share and intentionally inflicting pain, suffering, hurt, and harm. That’s why active disenfranchisement is selfish.
You have limited control of the world around you, save all within you. When you work with that, you’re empowered. When you’re empowered you become a lightning rod to help others find their empowerment. The more people become empowered the less the forces of chaos can control the masses.
That is what working with your limited control is all about. What you control in life might be limited but it’s still a lot. Working with it is for you and not selfish or harmful to anyone else.
What can you do to empower your life today?
This is the six-hundred-seventy-fourth (674) exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – applying mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.
I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.
Thank you for joining me. Feel free to re-post and share this.
The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is available here. Check out Amazon for my published fiction and nonfiction works.
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