A Lesson I Must Always Relearn

I’ve found that the most difficult thing for me to reconcile is how much I am actually able to control in my own life. If something goes wrong, it must be because of my own failings. That isn’t always the case. Sometimes things fall outside the realm of my influence, whether I like it or not. That should be obvious, and yet, there is a part of me that so desperately wants to settle for the thought that there must be something wrong with me or what I did. I think this is because of the issue of control. If the wrong lies within me, I can fix that. I am in control of that, I can change.

You’d be impressed how quickly I could change for you in an instant.

Well, that premise isn’t entirely true to begin with, notwithstanding the fact that even if I could, the fault of the matter doesn’t fall in line with that. There’s either nothing wrong with me or it was too late to do anything about it; regardless, the conclusion plays out the same. There’s nothing to be done except for accepting it. That’s easy enough at face value, but as that information continues to travel from each neuron to the next, the realization quickly turns to rejection. There lies the disconnect. 

But there must be something I can do.

Of course not! But that would be nice to believe so, and so often I can be self-indulgent, fattening myself so with these fantasies without considering a pause my teeth might as well go rotten the way I engorge on them like sweets. Candied desires so sickly sweet, the air I breathe turns to a pink haze, distorting the truth so I only see what I want to see. Stubborn to a fault, quick to understand but slow to accept it. 

So what then?

What else is there left to be said? In the end, surrounded by candy wrappers and a roaring stomach, I circle back to that initial point of realization and have no choice but to embrace it and accept it. The high wears off eventually and ultimately, I find I do have other things to live for. The vestiges of the past still weigh on my mind in some capacity, but within time, their groans grow duller and duller, those vestiges becoming vestiges of themselves, until they’ve shrunk so drastically the mind must work itself hard to try and take grasp of those shreds of shreds of memory.

To shreds and shreds it goes.

But again, that is just the extent of our control. We want so badly what we cannot receive through our efforts alone. That’s appropriate, though. We are man, not God. This is what we should want:

To be chosen.

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