Misson control
Accepting what you can control, what you can't, and what you shouldn't.
I spent the first half of my life thinking I was in control, and the second being controlled, although I didn’t realize it. In fact, I figured I was firmly the master of my destiny and would have never considered asking Jesus to take the wheel … not just because I’m a disbelieving heathen but because who would ever want to? Who wants to leave their fate to something as capricious as, er, fate?
But here’s the funny thing: control sucks. Not all control, of course—there’s a base level to ensure you don’t, say, ask Jesus to take the wheel and promptly find yourself wrapped around a tree. But trying to control everything and everyone is simply exhausting and self defeating; a recipe for being perpetually let down, because who and how can everyone live up to your unrealistic expectations? And how can they when—and here’s the critical point—you don’t actually control them?
I’ve been exasperatingly reminded of this in the past couple of weeks. Exhibit A is the ongoing saga of Joe Biden, who has lost control of arguably the most critical factor in any election campaign: the narrative. Whether he will withdraw from the presidential race has become a question of when, not if. Like an elderly relative refusing to give up the car keys, Biden is clinging to the notion he remains in control of his future, when reality has already made the decision for him.
The other example is personal. Divorce is hard, period. It’s jarring. And no matter how amicable parties try to be, both sides have to deal with dramatic shifts in a world once shared. There are really only two options when you’re in this maelstrom: you can accept everything changes, let go, and make the best of your new and evolving circumstances or … you can’t. But, like Biden clutching the car keys, the latter option simply denies reality. You’re calling it quits for a reason and the quicker divorcing couples embrace change over control, the better.
The collaborative divorce process I’m enduring sounds great in theory, but it also introduces a tricky wrinkle. In an adversarial divorce, it’s lawyers at 20 paces and the life you knew is quickly replaced. It’s shock therapy. In a collaborative divorce, you’re supposed to arrive at the same independent destination while, by design, retaining large parts of the old marriage dynamic. It definitely makes the journey easier for the kids, which is obviously the priority. But what about the adults?
If you have two people willing to embrace change, you’re good. But when one is used to believing they’re in control, it’s a real problem. The collaborative process encourages the illusion they can stay in the driver’s seat—but they’re not and they can’t. Divorce is divorce. Two people once joined become independent again, you do all you can to shield your kids from the fallout, and you move on. Meet new people. Start a wonderful fresh chapter. The challenge of the past few weeks has been dealing with someone struggling to accept that reality, trying to cling ever tighter to control something that’s disappeared. She’s grasping at thin air, throwing collaboration out the window with a lawyer on speed dial.
At first, I was really pissed off. It’s never nice when someone tries to control you, and it’s doubly pissy when they can’t but think they can. Then it morphed into something more like sympathy. I’ve always had a personality that wants clarity above all: tell me where things stand, and I’m good. It may not be what I envisioned, sometimes it’s not what I want, but everything happens the way it’s supposed to and you just plow ahead. Clinging to the remnants of a past life isn’t something I do and, for those who do, I imagine it’s really, really, really hard to let go.
Which is why control sucks. Who needs it? Life is complicated enough, without feeling the need to try to control someone else’s. Worry about what you have the ability to influence, accept nothing ever really goes to plan, laugh at the insanity of it all, adjust, and keep moving.
“We don’t always control what happens to us. But we always control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond,” Mark Manson writes in the deliciously titled The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. “We are always interpreting the meaning of every moment and every occurrence. We are always choosing the values by which we live and the metrics by which we measure everything that happens to us.”
You can choose to try to control everything, get angry when you can’t, and drive yourself nuts. Or you can, in Manson’s words, consciously choose what to give a fuck about. Trying to control something you can’t? Not worth it.
A note about whatever this is …
After writing a few thousand articles for newspapers and magazines, I spent a long time trying a bunch of other stuff. I guess I figured what came (relatively) easily must by definition be less valuable, so I wandered in the corporate wilderness, becoming increasingly frustrated and doing work that felt increasingly lousy.
Sometimes with age comes wisdom, and I’ve realized finding something (relatively) easy ain’t a bad thing. So, this is a space where I’m resurrecting writing for myself, on topics weird and wild and wonderful.
Posts will appear when the mood takes me, but I do try to be consistently inconsistent—sometimes it’ll be a couple of days between drinks; sometimes a week. But if you subscribe, you’ll get a email letting you know I’m ranting. Again.