Life Philosophy…at 28 – Part 4

Things I control

This one I figured out last year. Still trying to master it, but I’m making progress.

There are only four, read it – 4, things in the world that I can control. And I mean the whole world, the entire vast infinite universe.  On top of only four tiny things I can control, I can only do it some of the time.

Guess what? This is true for every living creature on this planet or any others. By now I’m sure you’re dying to know what they are; well here’s the list:

1.      Sometimes what I think

2.      Sometimes what I say

3.      Sometimes what I do

4.      Sometimes what I feel

I can’t control these things all the time. Sometimes the primordial, instinctual brain takes over and I do things out of reflex or I am triggered by some current event and transported back to my past.

I can’t control my breath, my heart rate, my digestive process, what I hear, what my skin feels, what I smell, what the driver ahead of me will do, what my partner will say, if someone will love or hate me, if I will have a job in two weeks, if my car will break down, if a giant asteroid will crash into the earth, if someone will surprise me on my way home….the list goes on and on. I can only notice these things and decide, as best I can, how I will react to them.

I’d love to have more control in my life, to wave a magic wand and make things just as I want them. But I can’t! So I can’t spend time wishing I could. I can only roll with the punches as they come and be kind to myself.

Left field on that, right? Not if you are a perfectionist. I’ve spend countless hours trying to be perfect, to make things just right, to make everyone happy with me. Once I learned about what I truly have control over, I began to realise that my drive for perfection was doing nothing but holding me back. That being said, I still try for perfection and want to be perfect. At least now I have a better understanding of what perfection truly means and I can’t beat myself up for doing something I don’t think I should be doing/have done.

I’m still learning what perfection is and what it looks like to me. I’m taking pottery wheel classes (have been since Feb) and it is the greatest thing a perfectionist can do. I’m learning that there is perfection in the seemingly imperfect; that a step back prior to destruction saves projects, face and heartbreak; and that no matter how much we try to make something just so, there are so many things out of our control and to embrace the end result regardless is freedom.