I like to be in control. It’s one of my things.
Life is good at reminding me I can’t be in control of everything.
Right after our twentieth wedding anniversary, my husband lost his job. A job that paid well. A job that provided us with good health insurance and all the things we needed (writing is not one of those kinds of jobs, for the majority of us).
It threw me into a tailspin. It was very hard on my family. It brought up some old childhood trauma.
I couldn’t control when (or if) he’d get another job or where that would be or how long our savings would last or what might happen in the gap.
It was excruciating. I started sliding into some of my life-is-out-of-control-and-I-need-control habits—not eating, exercising more, slipping into myself instead of talking to the people around me or seeking others for emotional help and support.
No amount of not-eating or overexercising or over-thinking or removing myself from society could change what was happening, though. I had to endure it.
So much of life is like this. I mean, we have all now lived through a global pandemic—are still living with it. This was completely and utterly unexpected. We had to endure it. We couldn’t control any of what happened—except where it concerned ourselves.
And that brings me to what we can control in life: ourselves.
I certainly can’t control other people—who my kids wake up being today, what food they decide they like this week and whether they complain about tonight’s dinner, how helpful that customer service representative will be on the other end of the phone line, how many emails Allstate will send me reminding me I have an auto quote ready, am I ready to proceed?
For a person who prefers control, a whole lot of life is out of my control. I would like to change so many things, but I don’t have control over that change. How kind people are to one another. The rate of inflation. AI taking the jobs of people I love. I can’t control how many people will read this newsletter or what the state of the world will be from day to day or what will happen in the news and how other people will report that news. I can’t control the rising prices of groceries that’s killing us or whether it will rain when I go out for my run tomorrow morning or whether I will sell another book, ever.
These things and their uncertainties I have to endure.
I’d like to change the world into a more just world, into an economically fair world, into a media literate world. I don’t have control over any of that—I mean, I can work for those things, certainly, but I can’t control whether my work will change anything significant.
Sometimes we just have to endure.
“I changed what I could—and what I couldn’t, I endured,” said Dorothy Vaughan, an American mathematician and computer programmer.
And we can endure. We can make it through. It may sound trite, but this, too, shall pass. My husband losing his job taught me that.
He has a new job. We’re catching up. We endured as well as we could. We’d like to have some easy times for a while, but one never knows what’s around the corner. We control what we can, and the rest we endure.
I hope you have a beautiful month of enduring—and changing whatever you can.
Here are some things I like to think about changing:
1. My own thoughts, opinions, beliefs and attitudes about my situation
There are times when I’ve been so overwhelmed I’ve said, “I just can’t do this.” And I couldn’t. When we say we can’t, we can’t.
My attitude about any situation can make it easier or harder for me. When I step out the door for a run and I think, “Oh, wow, it’s really humid, this is gonna be a tough run,” it is a tough run. And sure, maybe that’s because of the humidity, but it’s also because my mind believes it’s hard, and that become my reality. If I step out the door and think, “I’m feeling great today!” I have a much better and easier run.
We can do the same in our lives—approach each hurdle with a positive attitude. (I know, I know, I’m an eternal hopeful pessimist, and it’s hard to be positive about certain things…but I’m trying.) And the hurdles get a little smaller.
I like to repeat the mantra, I can do hard things, instead of This is too hard. Because then I can do hard things.
2. How I deal (or don’t) with my emotions
We can’t always control what emotions we feel during a particular situation, but we can control how they affect us and what we do with them.
Every emotion is acceptable. We just have to figure out healthy ways of dealing with them. Stuffing them down is not healthy. If we feel them, that allows them to pass, the way emotions are supposed to do. It lessens their power over us.
So we feel our emotions and we let them pass and we move on to the next thing.
3. My interactions with the world and other people
While we can’t control other people we come into contact with, we can control ourselves. When we experience unhelpful customer service, we can extend kindness to the person at the other end of it. Make sure they have a good interaction with us, because that’s a hard and mostly thankless job.
I like to think, I may be the only person who will love them today. What do I want that love to look like?
That’s something we can control.
Approach each other with love and compassion and acceptance—that’s a change worth working for.
