Until we appreciate the reality, usually late in life, that we have no control over what life delivers, most of us expend a lot of time and energy attempting to control our circumstances and what happens to us.
We make plans to achieve desired outcomes and follow through on our commitments. We attempt to manipulate the circumstances of our lives so they’ll conform with our preferences. Sometimes, things work out in line with our desires. At others, they don’t.
Things Go Wrong
Things happen we didn’t allow for and our plans get derailed. People do things we hadn’t anticipated and we end up disappointed. Nature steps in and rains on our parade or, worse still, floods our house. Someone starts a war that threatens our way of life.
In other words, things we’d rather not have to deal with happen, despite our best intentions and carefully crafted plans.
When life shows up in unexpected ways it’s often enough to make you feel like giving up and hiding someplace where you’ll be safe. But, even there, in your hideaway, if you’ve been lucky enough to find one, life refuses to leave you alone. There are no known places where you can escape the flow of life. Life is more intrusive than flowing water. That’s just how it is.
The Secret To Enjoying Life
The secret to enjoying life, no matter what happens, is to stop resisting what it delivers. This is where trust comes in. You can’t surrender to the flow of life unless you’re willing to trust it, and you’ll only start to trust life when you’re willing to recognise that it unfolds for you and is not out to get you, even when, at first blush, it seems to be doing just that.
The Illusion Of Control
I’m not sure how we come to believe we can control life, but somehow we end up thinking we do. Maybe we’re lulled into believing we’re in control by the routine nature of the lives we lead. When the same things happen with reliable regularity it’s easy to believe we can depend on certain things happening as anticipated. Cultural norms dictate patterns of behaviour, so we assume we can predict how people will behave under any given set of circumstances.
We take life for granted and give ourselves the credit for those times when things work out for us, and find someone else to blame when they don’t.
It’s not until life throws us a series of curved balls that it slowly dawns on us that we’re not the ones calling the shots and we realise there is a force much bigger than any of us directing things.
Some of us continue to resist and come up with conspiracy theories to explain what’s going on. You’ve probably heard or read about some of them, since in recent years social media has given their proponents a megaphone. But, they’re simply stories used to explain things we don’t understand or to blame particular groups who appear to have more power than we do. Life is bigger than any conspiracy theory, and much more interesting when you allow it to unfold without fighting to keep it under your control.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to us that we’re not in control, but it often does. I suspect we look at our achievements and how we’ve changed our environment to suit our needs and decide we must be in charge of life on the planet. As a group, we’ve been doing it since time immemorial. We even slipped that belief into the creation story we told ourselves before we started going all scientific and dreaming of the big bang. (Genesis 1: 26, for those who don’t remember or who’ve never opened the big book.)
Trusting Life
Trusting life doesn’t mean we stop making plans. We still need to organise our lives and work towards our goals. We still need to have some idea of what’s going on in the world and to work towards improving things. What trusting life does mean, however, is coming to terms with the limits of our powers to influence what happens next.
We all know that in order to achieve our goals we need to take the next step but, if we’re honest, we also know that we always do that in blind faith. We have no way of knowing what the outcome of that next step will be, despite all of our research and planning. In reality, we’re always trusting that life will go on and, so far, it has, despite all the natural and man-made disasters we’ve lived through.
A Mystical Perspective
In earlier times, we were encouraged to pray and place our trust in God – trusting that all will be well. The modern secular world is not so keen on following that advice, but that’s precisely what mystics like me are doing. Instead of trying to get God to conform with our ideas of how things should happen, we’re doing our best to align our way of living with how life unfolds for us.
This doesn’t mean we have carefree lives where everything works out just fine. We encounter the same ups, downs, joys and disappointments as everybody else. Our loved ones die, our plans don’t always work out, and our friends often don’t understand us. In fact, to an impartial observer, our lives look just like yours probably does.
What’s different about the way we live our lives is we don’t spend time or energy trying to control things we know we have no control over. In other words, we don’t fight with life, we trust it. We go with the flow and allow life to unfold in its own good time. We see life as an expression of the divine, and it’s the divine we spend our time with.
If you’re feeling stressed by what’s happening around you, maybe it’s time to stop fighting with life and trust its unfolding.
Background design in featured image by Martin Martz – used under Unsplash licence.