Stop.
Breathe.
Focus.
Accept.
Life is a completely insane rollercoaster, and you are not in control.
This is as it should be.
I still find myself struggling with this concept sometimes. For so many years, I attempted to exercise control over even small elements of my life, because I had failed so spectacularly at controlling major elements that I figured I could at least keep a firm grasp on those smaller things. Work events, finances, kid things, my house and what seemed like a million other things… I just couldn’t keep *anything* under control, and it began to wear on me. Stress and worry pervaded my everyday life in an exponential manner and, despite the constant advice from friends and family that I needed to stop worrying about these things I could not control, I continued to let these things dominate my life. Then, a constantly mounting heap of out-of-control just gave way one day. One more thing got tossed on top of my ever-growing pile at work, and in my mind’s eye I could see the pile threatening to give way to avalanche. Somewhere in the back of my head, I told myself “no more.” I had two choices: Let the avalanche sweep me away, or to grab the items as they cascaded by and try to make some sense of everything. I chose option number three: I walked away from the pile and started to take control of the only thing in this world (or out of it) that I had any real control over: Myself. My actions and reactions. My emotions. Me.
The end result of this was that, because I detached my emotions and my stress and anxiety from the situation, I was actually able to get a lot more accomplished than I did when I was spending time and energy running over all those worst-case scenarios of “what could happen if I don’t get all of these things done?” I didn’t realize exactly what I was doing at the time, but I now recognize it as my biggest step in over a decade toward accepting that I had no control, and building faith in the only thing that did have control.
There were still elements of that job that were holding me back, though. I had been in the same position there for a very long time, had made no moves toward an upward-mobile path, and was unlikely to do so. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had grown complacent. Even with this new found acceptance, I had decided that whatever happened there was out of my control and not worth worrying about. In that context and with that perspective, perhaps it’s easy to see why, when I lost my job, a big part of me said “this is for the best.” I looked at it as a challenge and an opportunity. It was still a bit difficult to deal with the personal (and financial!) side of losing my job, and that’s when I turned to “outside help,” which has turned out to be the best thing I have ever done.
But some people on the outside looking into my world saw only that I had lost my job, and what a terrible thing this was. They not only didn’t understand how I could be taking this so well overall, and not stressing out, but they also didn’t understand why I continued to assert that this was an opportunity and not a detriment. A big part of this was that they lacked my perspective. They hadn’t seen the situation exactly the way I had seen it. Their perspective was that something had happened in my heart and in my mind that clouded me to the reality of the situation: I was now part of the Michigan jobless statistic and no matter my personal merit, this is where I would be stuck for six months or more because that’s just the way things are here, statistically speaking. But then I would say things like “this situation is not OK, but that doesn’t mean that I have to be not OK,” and they would be left scratching their heads wondering where my mind had gone.
Perspective is everything. When you change your perspective and your attitude, negative things can be seen as having positive outcomes. When you accept that you do not have control and detach your stress and worry from the situation at hand, sometimes you can start to see the inkling of the greater plan that’s in front of you. Of course, none of us are God. We will never, even looking back in retrospect, be able to see so much as the complete plan for us as an individual, let alone the greater plan for another person and especially not for the world in its entirety. For some strange reason, this reminds me of a rather famous quote from, of all things, a horror novel: ”The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all of its contents.” I think that we as people would be completely unable to handle seeing the plan for even just ourselves laid out in its entirety, and what events in our life have driven us down that path. I think we would be even more appalled if we were to recognize the negative things in our life that came as a result of ignoring that plan where, instead of changing our attitudes, we plunged on with the same blindness and suffered even more severe consequences because we were ignoring that greater calling.
So, now, when I am under stress (and especially when I am *in distress*), I try to stop. Breathe. Focus. Accept that I am not in control of this roller coaster, and that all I have control over is myself. The situation is not OK. In fact, the situation is awful. But I am OK because I choose to take control of the one thing in the universe that I have any control over, and because I have somebody on my side who controls everything else. It’s at those times when the path to defeating my own negative reactions starts to light up and, while I’ll never be able to correlate all of the elements to see the path in its entirety, the way to deal with the immediate situation becomes clear. Instead of wasting energy worrying about the outcome of things I can’t control, I can redirect that energy toward accepting the challenges placed before me and finding the positive in every negative.
