Things don’t always go the way we would like. Life is messy. People around us frequently behave in ways we find illogical and frustrating. Things happen that we may not have expected.
It seems natural to attempt to control all aspects of our life. But we inevitably fail, and succeed only in causing ourselves stress and anxiety. So how else can we behave?
While our lives are inevitably messy, we can simplify our response. Rather than micromanaging each detail trying to make everything “perfect”, we just need to focus our efforts only on influencing the outcome for the important things in our life, and letting the other stuff go.
Even for the important things, we do not control the outcome, we can only make our best effort for the desired outcome, and then accept whatever transpires. With all the other messy details in our life, it’s best to focus on losing our judgment of them, and our expectations, and just let them be.
The tendency to view life as something to be sorted out and controlled sends us on a doomed mission for perfection in an imperfect world. It causes us to spend great energy trying to solve the unsolvable, organize the chaos, and prevent the inevitable. And that just stresses us, triggers anxiety, and exhausts us with no tangible benefits.
Far better to apply a little of this energy on allowing and accepting the messiness of life. Focussing our efforts only where it really matters, and where we can actually make a difference.
Ultimately, our life is not much affected by unimportant things that didn’t go our preferred way. But the lowered stress and anxiety from simply letting them unfold as they will improves our quality of life immensely.
Going with the flow is so much less effort, and frequently results in magical outcomes that we could never have imagined or hoped for. Outcomes that perhaps would not have happened had we tried to control things. Not only does our interference usually fail to achieve what we hoped for, but it may prevent wonderful outcomes from materializing.
Peace does not come from achieving perfection (which of course is impossible, and a fool’s errand), but from accepting outcomes.
Rather than trying to change the world, we turn our focus to accepting the world as it is.
Rather than trying to change ourselves, we apply our energy to accepting ourselves just as we are.
