Tuesday, July 10, 2012

I Cannot Control The World

Situations don't create stress, they create unresolved emotions due to their outcomes, or lack thereof. It is these unresolved emotions that create stress. I can remember so many times where I would agonize over something; I would just sit there thinking about what went wrong with the situation and how I could have changed something to better benefit myself. I remember how I agonized over the imminent lack of insurance I was about the experience. I remember how I tried to figure out how I could have changed something about my life so that my liver wouldn't fail. I remember so many situations where my emotions were so out of control and undirected that the stress the emotions caused would literally put me in the hospital. One day I realized that stress is mostly just a byproduct of wasted energy. Our unresolved and undirected emotions are wasted energy. The day that I realized this was the day that I asked my partner a question -- the content of the question is moot -- and his answer was, "I don't know. I don't care. I cannot control the world. Let me focus on what I can control."

This careless statement got me thinking. How much energy had I spent on items that I had no control over? How many times could I have redirected my anger, sadness, or other emotion toward something constructive and under my control. This perspective helped me change my life from one that was fairly negative to one that was a tad more positive. Rather than lamenting the loss of my current insurance, I found a loophole that allowed me to acquire a new insurance. I accepted that I might need a liver transplant and used that energy from worry to change my diet only to later find that my liver miraculously rebounded. The progression and change was anything but easy. Most of us learn to be loathsome of change from an early age, but I learned to harness that emotion as a potent form of energy.

Many years later, I still use my mantra to keep myself focused and to redirect my energy toward constructive tasks that help me. I make good things happen from bad situations. If you have been reading my blog, you will have read about my work out regime and its progress. The progress with my work outs is directly related to my ability to redirect my anger. So many things in my current life make me frequently anger. It is amazing how powerful these raw, unbridled emotions can be and how much energy they carry with them. Rather than punch a wall or lament over a fantasy killing, I would channel that anger into a work out. After the work out there was no more bottled up anger to create undue stress on my body plus I progressed in making my body stronger. 

I cannot control the world, but I can focus on what I CAN control.

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