may intention
monthly theme: [control]
As the authors who project and ascribe meaning onto our lived experience, namely the experience of 2020, we control the narrative, giving context to past events. But as the characters who still exist in a world where Covid-19 is present, reality builds parameters that separate what we can control from what we cannot. And we must distinguish when to narrate and when to experience.
Control is like the dictionary--it’s heavy, heady, and gives us structure, meaning, defines our context. Defining our reality is the first step to controlling it. And control can mean so many things that I almost don’t even know where to begin. But since I am the author of this essay, I might as well control where our collective focus goes for the next few paragraphs.
Except I can’t fully control what you contemplate while reading my words. My past self can only suggest the words for you to read, carefully selecting and controlling them to communicate an intended meaning. But intentions don’t always translate and I can’t even control what you understand from this because although we might use the same dictionary, I can be working with the first definition listed and you could be working with the third.
Is all of that too meta? I feel like I’m annoying my future self who will have to edit this incessantly, attempting to exert even more and more control over my meaning here. And creating personal meaning might ultimately be the only thing that we can control.
From the shock of Covid-19 to the tension of adjusting our entire lives around it, our actions have been about control, existing on the spectrum of adding this traumatizing experience to our map of the world to completely denying that the virus even exists. At any point along this spectrum of reaction, all we actually controlled was ourselves--our actions. All of us saw the veil of control evaporate along with the cultural structures that built the veil in the first place. Such a terrifying revelation that many of us dealt with the emotions caused by this loss of control by attempting to exert our control over others.
This was a frustratingly impossible task for any of us who took it up. Our actions reflected the meaning we were making of the news as it came out (or maybe there was some cognitive dissonance between knowledge and action which only added to our inner turmoil). But we expected everyone to draw the same conclusions as us, often feeling as if opposing meanings could not coexist with our own...even though there has never been total consensus of thought in the history of civilization.
Even if we can’t agree on what’s “really going on,” we can all agree to take a look at how our conclusions affect our emotions. And how our emotions affect our actions. And how our actions affect those around us.
The first draft of this essay spent a lot of time dissecting the phrase, “we can’t control our emotions, but we can control our actions.” But finding the phrase’s meaning is ultimately a journey of discovering personal truths, unpacking what you were taught to believe about your emotions and their relationship to your behaviors. Dispelling infinite “shoulds” that come from anywhere other than the truth revealing itself to you in the present moment. And I hope this approach graciously presents itself to you when contemplating “control” this month.
I hope you let go of control in regards to your emotions. I hope you find the medicine in allowing your emotions to control you from the safety of solitude, a time and place where nothing has to make any sense and no one’s decisions have anything to do with your own. I hope this approach feels revitalizing, even if it comes with the soreness of new movements. Even if it feels a little heavy, know it cannot kill you, it can only kill an old version of you(r understanding. Of your control).
Enter into a new relationship with control--release the need to be on solid ground even as the world melts around you. What would it feel like to melt along with it? To enter into a relationship with change, giving into the natural rhythms of life, even if it seems as if the syncopation is off--why do we think we know better than nature? Why is our impulse always to control what is beyond us? What does that even mean for our humanity?
control mood board:
