If you are a control freak then you probably hate not knowing something. It messes with your mind and defies your equilibrium. Guess what? The only thing you know for certain about your life is what is going on right now! You don’t know about the future – whether that means the next minute or the next year. This is unknown to all of us. (Exception psychics?)
I believe there is more that we don’t know than do know. I know how I feel most of the time. I know what I like and don’t like. I know what I have learned in my lifetime, and so on. What do I not know? I don’t know what tomorrow will bring, or the next five minutes for that matter. I don’t know where I will be in five years. I don’t know when or how I will die. I certainly don’t know what other people are thinking. How does that sit with you?
Are you anxious about the future? Does it bother you that you cannot always predict others’ behavior? This makes me think of marriage. A great example is how we don’t always know how our spouses will behave under certain circumstances. If you have been together long enough, you can guess with a fair amount of accuracy, but often you are caught off guard. This is one of the delights of marriage. (Really.) You might be surprised! Sometimes not in a good way, like the couple who has been married for 30 years and the wife wakes up one morning to the sound of her husband walking out the door – for good! Usually it is nothing quite as drastic. Most often you simply learn something new about them.
The best way to cope with not knowing things is to accept it. Deal with it. Live with it. Embrace the unknown. Scary? Maybe. But it is the way of things. When I was younger and occasionally today, one of the hardest things for me to accept was not knowing why something happened, something that impacted me greatly. Example, why did my horse get sick with a disease that has a thousand causes and then die after every possible treatment was administered to her? I will never know and never understand. I just had to accept it and move on. Tough lesson.
Young people getting married think it will last forever. Hopefully they have chosen well and it does. But there are no guarantees. Life has none of those, guarantees, that is. When you signed up for it, you signed up for whatever may happen and you don’t get to know ahead of time what that will be. Depressing? It doesn’t have to be. It can be exciting, an adventure that continues, with things happening along the way. How you deal with those things will determine your happiness and success in life.
One of the sweetest feelings in the world is letting go – of control or of the desire to control. It is freeing. It allows you to play instead of working hard to figure things out. Enjoy your life, make the choices that are best for you and then live in the moment, unafraid of the moments that follow. You will survive those just as you survived the moments prior.
If we had everything figured out it would be incredibly boring – and so would we be. Boring, that is. Accept that you don’t get to know everything or understand everything that happens. Change what you can, let go of what you cannot. And pray for the wisdom to know the difference. Sound familiar?