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.
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