“You cannot always control what goes on outside. But you can always control what goes on inside.”
~Wayne Dyer
Today we will continue our study in duality. As we talked about in our last post, duality quite literally means, ‘having two parts, often with opposite meanings, like the duality of up and down. The interesting part about duality to me is that there is no “good” and “bad”. You must have one to have the other so why would we label one as desirable and the other as not desirable? I like to think about it like the wave on the beach. The tides come in and the tides go out. One is no more desirable than the other. They just are.
Today we’re going to talk about control.
Control is a necessary part of human existence. I believe that humans have been battling with control since the beginning of time. But the question is, what can and should we actually control?
To understand this better we should first look at the definition of control. The Webster Dictionary has quite a few definitions of the word including:
– the power to influence or direct people’s behavior or the course of events
– the ability to manage a machine, vehicle, or other moving object
– the restriction of an activity, tendency, or phenomenon.
– the power to restrain something, especially one’s own emotions or actions.
– a means of limiting or regulating something.
We can ‘simplify’ that a bit by saying control is “the ability to manage, limit or restrict events, activities, emotions, people or objects”. At least that is my interpretation of what Webster is saying. And I truly and wholeheartedly disagree with this definition!
So now that we understand the annotation of the word, let’s go back and look at the question again so we can dive into it a bit more: what can and should we control? I believe that the only thing we can truly control is ourselves! We can influence the world around us, however, especially with other freethinkers our influence can only go as far as it is allowed. Kids are a great example of this. Kids want structure. They like rules and boundaries but when those rules and boundaries are taken too far, they rebel. This is where the nuances of human relationships come into play (but that’s a discussion for another day) and the basic principle remains the same.
So we’ve decided that the only thing we truly CAN control is ourselves so now onto the ‘should’ part of the question. What should we control? As I’ve spoken of many times, balance is a necessity. So we should control ourselves and we also should allow the opposite, which is what we will talk about in my next post.
Today, how can you control what’s going on inside? At all times we can choose what to think and there are SO many variations on how we can think on just one subject alone. Today, what do you choose to think and believe? How can you control you?
In Love and Light,
Do you want to explore self control a bit more?
