Anytime you’re trying to control how things will work out, you set yourself up for suffering.
The world is set up to remind you that you’re not in control. Trying to conform things to how you want them is a waste of effort and energy that could be used elsewhere.
This is Alan Watts on control:
Anytime, as it were, you voluntarily let up control, in other words you cease to cling to yourself, you have an access to power. Because you’re wasting energy all the time in self-defense, trying to manage things, trying to force things to form to your will. The moment you stop doing that, that wasted energy is available. …
When you’re trying, however, to act as if you were God, that is to say, you don’t trust anybody and you’re the dictator, and you have to keep everybody in line, you lose the divine energy. Because what you’re doing is simply defending yourself.
If you struggle to give up control, you can be assured that nature will help you learn to let go.
As Watts explains:
The meaning of the fact that everything is dissolving constantly, that we’re all falling apart, we’re all in a process of constant death …. that’s the great assistance to you.
That fact that everything is in decay is your helper. That is allowing you that you don’t have to let go, because there’s nothing to hold onto. It’s achieved for you, in other words, by the process of nature.
So you simply need to stay in the process.
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