LETTING GO OF CONTROL

If you look to others for fulfillment,

you will never truly be fulfilled.

—Tao Te Ching - Verse 44

Three strange and buried memories surfaced during my last meditation:

1. I discovered childhood jealousy toward my cousin because my parents got divorced and his did not.
2. There was a group of kids on my elementary school bus that got picked up before me, so I always had to sit just outside the “good seats.” This physical separation, along with a perceived emotional separation between kids whose parents hadn’t gotten divorced and me, seemed to create an “outcast” barrier in my mind.
3. I used to play with the daughter of my mother’s friend whenever my mother went over to visit. She was my age and fun and pretty and made me feel a warmth I hadn’t known. It was the puppiest of puppy dog loves before I knew what love was, and she made that feeling of being an outcast go away.

But one day my mother stopped visiting that friend, and I never saw that girl again. So the feeling of no longer being an outcast was taken away by the very person at the root of my feeling like an outcast in the first place. And that was when I developed a resentment toward feeling out of control.

I wished my parents had never split up, but that was out of my control.

I wished I could have kept seeing that girl, but that was out of my control.

I wished I didn’t feel like an outcast, but that was out of my control too.

At least, that last one was the story my subconscious mind had been holding onto.

But here, I was able to shine conscious awareness on the notion that someone else can lessen the feeling of being an outcast and instead actually let go of feeling like an outcast.The difference is that the former is never under our control: you can’t control the way you feel about someone else; you can’t control the way someone else feels about you; you can’t control whether or not you find love at all; and even if you find love, you can’t control the fact that life can often interfere. But what is in your control is letting go of the attachment to things that are out of your control while trusting that God has everything under control for you.