Can you control the future? The illusion of control vs. trusting in life.
We do not want to feel pain, suffering, loss and grief.
We want life to be safe. We want to have some sort of guarantee that nothing ‘bad’ will happen.
We create a web of thoughts that gives us a (false) sense of security and safety. A (false) sense of being in control.
You make a plan in your head, you plan everything through, every little detail of how things COULD go, making additional plans for what you will do if scenario A happens, if scenario B happens, if scenario C happens. You plan how things SHOULD go, in order for you to feel good, to feel safe, to feel that your life is a success.
Your mind is filled with these plans, these ‘shoulds’ and ‘should nots’. Your mind is a crowded place. Crowded with distressing thoughts. Thoughts that have nothing to do with reality.
You make a plan for a time in the future. You are attempting to control the future. You are attempting to create a future within which you will feel good and safe, within which you can say that ‘everything fell into place’ once your imagined plan turns into reality.
There is one thing that we are good at forgetting, that we are trying to forget and even defy by making these plans:
You can not control the future.
The future is not controllable because it does not exist.
The only time that exists is now. The only time that you can take action is now.
(You still can not control everything in the now, there are things, so many things, that lie beyond your control; but the now is the only time and place where you can take action).
The future is just an imagination, it only exists in your head.
The future is not an actual time and place that you can go to now. As soon as something happens it is the now, it has become reality, no longer an imagined state in the future (in your head).
‘Future’ is just a concept, same as ‘past’. These are not actual places. The only place there is, is ‘now’. For whatever happens, happens in the now.
This leaves me with the idea that when the future does not exist, what are you trying to control?
Why seek to control something that does not exist?
The attempt of controlling the future, is an attempt at controlling how you feel. You are planning the future in order to not get hurt.
It´s a protection mechanism for you to go through the world, through life unharmed. Planning the future creates the illusion of control, the illusion of safety and security.
I´m not sure of whether to say:
There is no safety. There is no security.
Or:
Everything is safe. Everything is secure.
Maybe it doesn’t matter which one I consider to be truer. Because both lead me to the same conclusion: there is no need for control.
If you believe that there is no 100% safety, no 100% security, no matter how much you plan and control, why plan and control in the first place?
Planning and controlling only creates the illusion of safety and security, not actual safety and security.
If you believe the latter statement that everything is safe and secure, no matter what happens; then there certainly is no need to plan and/or control anything either.
Maybe both are equally true: There is no safety, no security, yet everything is perfectly safe and secure.
Maybe it´s not either or. Maybe it´s just both.
Either way (or both), I´m left with the notion that planning and controlling is not needed.
Things happen as they happen. Life is unfolding perfectly in miraculous ways. Everything is unfolding to perfection.
Repeat to yourself:
I surrender my desire to plan and to control into the spaciousness of trust.
I surrender my fear into the spaciousness of trust.
I trust in life.
I trust in the perfect unfolding of things - no matter what happens.
You can find the correlating mediation on my YouTube channel and on the meditation app Insight Timer.