Can You Control It?

As far as I see it, there are two ways to look at life: either you can try to control it or you can accept it.

We all make certain decisions in life based on our previous experiences but also based on what we think might happen in the future. This is all very well but, the fact is, none of us knows what will happen in the future, there are millions of different scenarios which could play out.

A bit like the butterfly effect in chaos theory, one tiny change could have a massive impact on the direction that our lives take.

This means that, when we try to control life, we start to think about all the tiny things that could happen and all the potential consequences; it’s usually referred to as worry. On top of that we then try to prevent the things that we’ve decided will have a negative impact on our lives and encourage those things we see as positive.

Unfortunately, because we can’t see into the future, we don’t actually know whether what we do will have a positive or a negative outcome. Effectively all we will have achieved is to put ourselves through the imagined stresses associated will all the different scenarios and all the different outcomes and, chances are, none of it will make a blind bit of difference. To quote someone I loved very much and lost:

“Worry is like riding a rocking horse; it will give you something to do but it won’t get you anywhere”

The alternative is to accept what life offers us and realise that it won’t last forever whether it be a good experience or a bad one. The only thing that we can really control is how we view the moment in time that is now