Out of my control

Sometimes, the world just decides to spin on it's own axis and forgets to ask me permission for changing plans. The thing is, when this happens, the world also forgets to warn me ahead of time so that I can give permission to the universe for the plans to change. I find this extremely annoying, irritating, and well, unpleasant.

That happened this week when certain plans, things that were going to occur and perhaps affect my life in big and not so big ways, were changed. Not just changed actually, but canceled. Splat.

I know I'm being vague. Purposely so.

The point has less to do about the actually plan being altered this week as it does about the idea of control, or lack thereof. I can actually control very little in my life and in the lives of others.

For a long while after Grace died, our lives spun out of control in a direction that had me constantly questioning everything I did. And as I desperately tried to cling to finding purpose again in my own life, I found myself for a short while, completely letting go. Not giving up necessarily, but letting go of any and all expectations. There was a certain freedom in that to be sure.

But as the years have passed, as time in it's own cliched version of life, marches forward, my hold on control has slowly returned. There are things about this I definitely like, and things about this that I abhor.

Four years ago, if you had met me, I'd tell you that I am a very different person than I was BG (before Grace). In fact, if you'd be interested in entering my life, I'd have to vet you first to see if you could handle my grief, the person I felt like being on any given day. And there were those people I knew BG that had to pass certain tests in order to stick around. The most crucial test simply being: Can you understand that my grief is raw, present and unpredictable?

And I developed a laissez faire approach to things, that is, I didn't really give a damn about what happened when it happened. In other words, I gave up most control.

Interestingly, little affected me, but I also found myself mildly distant from caring about a lot of things. In other words, my passions disappeared, my control, or lack thereof, left me in a free-fall kind of way of living.

I thought this was my new choice.

Turns out, though, that some level of control in a person's life is in fact a good thing. Some things, however minor, are good to control.

But this also means that vulnerability creeps in again.

So here I am watching things spin out of control and trying to decide what in fact I should try and reign in, try to control and what I should just let go of.

These things are not always necessarily easy to figure you.