Control

In my last post I talked about choices, and at the heart of that is a sense of control.  It's natural to want to control where you are going, and to do that you need to have a sense of which direction you are heading.  If you start your journey with what you want you will always feel far off from your destination, but if you start with where you are now and what you have, you can gradually monitor progress.

There are plenty of things you can control, but it's also important to realise that there may be some things you can't.  Change constantly happens around you, sometimes things will happen that you don't understand and have no say over. It's possible to save yourself a lot of suffering if you accept this inevitability and learn from it as you go.

You do have a say over how the future unfolds and how you react to things you didn't anticipate.  Even if it doesn't seem like it, you choose the things you do every day, how you will interpret situations, and how you will react to them.  You can also decide at any time that you don't need to have all the answers, and you don't have to know and control everything. It's important to have realistic expectations - sometimes life is unfair and things will go wrong, but situations are only stressful if you allow them to be. You just have to trust that you know enough to take responsibility for now.