Control

"The life I have been living is not the same as the life that wants to live in me." -Parker Palmer

I've been feeling out of control lately. I'm so good at seeing what could be done to improve things. What should happen, what shouldn't happen. Or...what should have happened, and what shouldn't have happened.

I can't keep my grandfather alive. I can't take my brother's cancer away. I don't know what my new job will be like. I don't know if I will be safe if I travel to Palestine and Israel. I don't know what it will be like to live here without my best friends who have all graduated. I can't do all the fix-ups that I want on my new house. I don't know what I want to do next spring after I am done working at the college.

There is so much I don't know. There is so much I have no influence over. There is so much that doesn't happen when I want it to. There is so much that happens without my permission!

So I have been angry. Which, thanks to all the Gary Zimmerman classes, :-) I know is a secondary emotion.

But really, being angry isn't that fun or satisfying. And it's exhausting. So, here is my resolution (so what if it's not Jan. 1 yet). I will no longer feel angry without exploring what is beneath the anger. I will seek peace in my life and continue to positively influence what I am capable of influencing. But to control it....well, I am guessing that to control things isn't what creates a meaningful life. And I'm guessing that anger is not what wants to be living in me.

And when I'm angry about the unknown, then I miss out on all the beauty of the unknown. I like the mystery of budding flowers, the vastness of the night sky, and the excitement of possibility in life.

Join me? :-)

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what i have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

-William Stafford