Desire to Control Leads to a Loss| Daily Meditation-December 16, 2021
Today’s Quotation:
Ask not that events should happen as you will, but let your will be that events should happen as they do, and you shall have peace.
Epictetus
Today’s Meditation:
Possibly the oldest issue known to humankind is that of control. How much energy and time do we spend trying to make things turn out the way that we think they should? How many hours of anger and frustration have we spent because our efforts have failed, and things turned out some other way instead of the way we wanted them to? Desire to control leads to a loss.
Letting life do what life wants to do sounds too passive to many of us–it almost sounds defeatist to say that we’re not going to try to get our way or do something that we really want to do. But our desire to control outcomes leads to a great loss of peace for us, as will usually happen when there is a lack of balance. In this case, the lost balance is between what we want as an outcome and what the actual outcome is. If we don’t try to impose our will on life, though, and we acknowledge the fact that not everything we want is for the best, then we can find that balance between wanting and accepting something that is really outside of our wants. And then we will experience the peace that is meant to be ours.
There’s a lot to be said for letting things happen as they will. Scientists would have it no other way, for that’s the only way that they can observe phenomena and learn how they work. If we let things happen as they will, we can learn a lot about people we know and their wants and needs and strengths and weaknesses, and the more we learn about them the more we can help them when they need our help. And isn’t that one of the best reasons to learn anything–to gain the ability to help when help is needed and we’re available?
Questions to ponder:
1. When have you recently tried to control the outcomes of something you didn’t have control over?
2. Why do we tend to think that it’s necessary to control events and other people’s actions?
3. What are some of the benefits of letting events happen as they do?
For further thought:
The sun will set without your assistance.
The Talmud
Credit: Living Life Fully
