Control

The only person you control is yourself.  This seems like a fairly simple concept to grasp.  Your brain is in your body, it sends impulses, your body reacts.  The chemicals that inspire emotion run between your synapses.  The thoughts, the hopes, the spirit, they are all in your temple.  So of course you are you and you are in control of yourself, ultimately.

And no one else.

But yet we so often act as if we have divine power over others.  There are phases of life in which this becomes stronger.  Any young pregnant lady can attest to the fact that even random strangers on the street act as if they should have some sort of control over her.  They ask personal questions, are offended if rebuffed.  They do not say “have you considered…?” but instead word things as, “you must [do this]” and “you certainly have to [do that]“- as if a random stranger has earned the right to make commands.

Parents in the public square with their children also face it.  A child talks back, a stranger reprimands them.  A child starts to cry, all eyes turn.  Strangers offer up advice.

But it is not always strangers who attempt to exert power.  Ever seen a group of people examining a car engine?  Person 1 says to person 2, “it’ll be the belt.”  Person three says, “Oh, what a noob, it’ll be the hose.”  They then order around whichever person is actually getting their hands dirty.  They wager, they bicker, they threaten.  Eventually the problem is sussed out (generally neither a belt or a hose) and everyone states how had their (wrong) opinion been respected, things would have gone better.

Now let’s get very serious.  Look at relationships.  Everyone is very free with advice about how to make relationships work, myself included.  But when it comes to close friendships, dating and marriage, it’s always down to two people.  And eventually, one.  It’s all about one person’s choices, and how that one person feels about them.  Yet the larger world just LOVES to give advice and loves to mock, harangue, and belittle when said advice isn’t taken.  It’s very easy as an outsider to say, “but she’s controlling and manipulative!  Leave!” but an outsider doesn’t know what goes on behind closed doors or the real truth of their relationship.  It’s easy for an outsider to say, “but when he does that he’s being abusive!”, and perhaps it’s true, he is being abusive.  But we have no real power to make someone else leave when they don’t want to.

And you certainly can’t make someone just change.  If someone did come up with a method to snap their fingers and invoke change, they’d become a millionaire in a millisecond.  We all have things about each other we want to change.  We all have patterns in other people we want erased.  We all want our opinion, our advice, our knowledge verified by someone else respecting it.  We all spend such ridiculous amounts of time focused on trying to get our little fingers into other people’s business.

And somewhere along the way, we forget that we control ourselves.  We forget that we do things that are stupid, too.  We make bad choices about our bodies, our children, our relationships.  We forget that when the engine grease is on our own fingers sometimes our instincts are bad.  We forget that we sometimes behave in the most childish of ways, or the most hopelessly romantic, or the most foolishly submissive.  We forget that like all other people, we can control ourselves but we so often forget to.

This world is a crazy place.  It’s nice to feel as if we’ve got some power over our immediate surroundings, people included.  But we must remember the fact that it’s all of those people asserting their own power that makes it such a crazy world.  So embrace the insanity around you, if you will, and just control your self.

July 17, 2008. Tags: control, self, self-control. Relationships, life.