letting go....

A story from my stressful years:

I started these two lists;

"Things I can control" and "Things I can't control"


And as I listed all the things I could control, such as;  how I spend my time, how I spend my money, my behaviour, my physical actions, who I spend my time with, where I spend my time, the things I surround myself with, my words, my mind (sometimes),  my diet and exercise, etc.,

I realised that these things are all just "WHAT I DO".

And the list of things I couldn't control like; the weather, what all other people and animals do, deterioration of possessions, disease, economicsm politics etc.

They all seem to boil down to: "EVERYTHING ELSE" that isn't "WHAT I DO".

And then I realised that I spent pretty much all of my time trying to make my life "now" and "in the future" as perfect as possible, but that meant trying to control EVERYTHING.  And that's just stupid.  Because I can't control EVERYTHING.

I can only hope to control "WHAT I DO"!

So it sounds simple and it's such a simple idea that I wonder why I'd never thought of it before.  Maybe everyone else in the world knew this already.  It only took me 40 odd years to get to the stage to ask the question and only a couple minutes of scribbling to come up with the answer. 

But there you go. 

So it was easy from then on.  I only needed to focus on controlling "what I do" and let everything else do whatever it wanted.  I couldn't do anything about those other things, so there was no point giving them any real concern.  I maybe could try to influence things that I felt strongly about, but that's all I hoped to do.  

It gave me loads more time to give that focus where it was going to be useful.  And there was a new peace that's came with this new knowledge.  A burden that lifted.

I felt like I'd been given a fresh start. 

And so back to now, I'm hoping for some sunshine this week-end, but I'm not making my enjoyment of the days contingent on it........we'll go for a cycle anyway and if we get wet, we'll get wet. 

And have fun anyway.

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