Tuesday 8/6/24
People have a desperate need for control, but usually it's a deleterious, or illusory, form of control. We see how they try to control narratives--by embellishing, omitting, and more often than not just lying. They lie to themselves, they lie to others, and if they're on social media, they lie there in almost every instance.
When we try effect a form of what I think of as force-control, we create chaos. The chaos is of the emotional variety, but the distance is short between the regions of emotional chaos and spiritual chaos. I'm not talking of God, but of our innermost selves. Chaos in our souls, if one would like to apply that word.
I prefer the control that comes with letting things be what they are, understanding what they are, and going from there. We must first assess and accept, and it is only then that we are in a position to put into use this control that eludes us otherwise. Control--the good kind--is an opportunity for a more direct form of agency. Agency of the here and now. Carpe diem agency--but must do the actuating or it's missed opportunity instead.
Control has a bad reputation in these times. "They were controlling me." And yet ironically, everyone is desperate for control--so desperate that they'll make up anything, tell themselves and others anything, so that they may appear to have it. They'll try to force themselves to buy into a falsehood that they have it, even when they know better, and what they end up doing is controlling--as in limiting--themselves.
I was thinking yesterday about my ex-wife as I ran stairs outside of City Hall where we were married, this evil person and one of extreme cowardice and myself. There is enough about what happened in these pages for now and in a few other spots. The full story will be told outside of this journal in the different pages of a book when the time is right. But what I was asking myself yesterday--as if I was both interviewer and subject--was whether or not I truly loved her. And I did. As much as I have ever loved anyone. That was true. I don't need to tell myself that it wasn't, even if this is the worst person I've ever known. To do what was done, in that calculated, premeditated manner, a person would have to be.
But I did feel a different way about this person than with anyone else I've ever known, and what's more, I chose to love them. The conscious mind is involved with love if love is really love. It's not just something that happens like getting wet in the rain because you're outside when the clouds open up. That this thing about how I felt and chose to feel was real and that I know what I know about this person and who they are both things I can accept because I have to because they are true.
There's very little comfort to be had in illusion, because illusion both wears off and sticks around. It's not substantive. You can't build with illusion. You're banking on a mirage and a mirage has no solidity, allows for no foundation. The mirage dissolves--the image, that is--and it's just fog. No, I shouldn't say fog--there's ruminative value in fog. More like haze. Obscuring haze. Fog may envelope; it has interiority in that we may be inside of it. Haze is exteriority. It's over there, not that which you are in the middle of, where we are, where we think, from out of which we find our way. Why do you think, for instance, that fog can be so potent in literature?
To know something, we must know it from the inside out. Including ourselves. The meaning afforded in our experiences. I would always rather just get down to it. Perhaps some of the reason is because I've been in a place that is worse than hell for so long--and I chose those words as I use all of my words very carefully--and I have had to change as a result and change as other humans don't have to change in their lives. And often they won't change, regardless. They try to avoid, whereas for myself, what is the point in avoiding? It's not like things could make me feel worse.
Thus these things, for me, may be problems to solve, if they are solvable, but whatever they may be, I want to deal with them as they are, which means eliminating haze and mirage. Haze and mirage are additional things for me to deal with. I want to reduce that number, and I have the control to remove haze and mirage, so I utilize that control.
What does that mean right now? It means that I see things clearly, for what they are. One might say, "Well, that's cold comfort in your situation," and while that is true, I am working in conjunction with truth, not in opposition to it. My future self, existing in a better time, place, situation, will be better served because of this. He will have more opportunity for direct agency, he will know what this means, and will be able to max out on that opportunity, pull it towards him, and send back out into the world that which he has made of and from it.
Sometimes, the pay-off, if you will, for a way of being, comes later. Or certain forms of the pay-off. But we must be ready. We must treat our lives as if the future we wish to have is about to happen, is happening, started happening yesterday, and this is in part how that future gets made. We must exercise that control, for it is a real form of control that we have. It is also, ultimately, the most important. The path of light crisscrosses, zags, and debouches many times over. But it starts with a single point. This is that point. Unless you've been air-dropped in, you can't get to the middle of a path without the beginning of it, and you can't advance along it without the next part. There's no point in delaying if you are to be on that path anyway. To do so is to choose chaos when you may instead elect for control.
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