Are You Flowing or Controlling?

Seems most of us enter recovery with a very dire need to control life. The concept of flowing with life is totally foreign to us. We are so used to scripting every moment of every day in our heads. We decide what we think others should or should not do in order to please us. Thoughts like “No one should bother me today,” “He should have called me,” “She should want to see the movie I want to see” run through our heads second by second. These are all controlling thoughts. They are designed to ensure our personal happiness—and yet they do just the opposite: They make us miserable because we can rarely enforce them and make them reality.

Every day we have a choice. We can script out our day and set ourselves up on a course of manipulation (control) and disappointment, or we can let go and ease into the flow of the day as determined by our Higher Power.

I have learned to stop scripting not only my work days but also my free days and vacation days. Sure, I take time to plan what I am going to do on a given day, but I no longer predetermine the outcome. I no longer romanticize about how nicely a holiday should play-out. For example, I don’t daydream about what this person or that person should say or do or give me in order to ensure that they please me on Christmas Day. I simply allow the day to unfold as it is meant to unfold without any assumptions or expectations on my behalf. And you know what? The day works out pretty darn well when I no longer try to control it.

It’s the same way when I’m on vacation with friends. The only time I find myself disappointed now is when I realize that I slipped and allowed myself to have an expectation of how it should be. Sometimes we aren’t even fully conscious that we have embraced an expectation and are clinging to it, until we feel the pang of disappointment. But when I feel that pang, I am now ready to take responsibility for it. I realize that I engaged an expectation and that I set myself up for disappointment. No one else is to blame but me and I then choose to forgive myself. I release the expectation, I release my disappointment and I get back into the flow of the moment—where real joy is.

And all is well.

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