Coming to terms with your inability to control your fate

You can’t control everything in your life and trying to will only make things worse.

Not being in control is stressful. Not knowing how things are going to turn out is scary. It would be nice if we could be assured of everything going our way. But that’s unrealistic.

The universe does not conspire to help you out. It doesn’t conspire to hurt you either. It’s not sentient so it doesn’t really think.

Other people do though. And they may or may not be trying to help you and a few of them may actually try to harm you for their own gain. That’s life. That’s what we all have to deal with. And some of us come into this life with a better hand and more privilege than others.

I’m not going to get into the subject of privilege here. What I want to talk about is how we best make do given the difficulties we have and the fact that we are going to have to work to get anything we want because – again, the universe isn’t going to magically provide for us.

The first step is to accept that reality. You don’t have control over everything in your life. You don’t’ have control over other people. You only have control of yourself and your choices. And your choices have an impact. In fact, your choices impact your future ability to make choices.

Each choice has a consequence. Those consequences can be good, bad or indifferent. While you can’t guarantee whether any given choice will result in a good outcome, you can change the odds to your favor and the cumulative effect of changing the odds slightly to your favor over the course of your life is astonishing.

Take for instance the choice to drive drunk or not.  Driving drunk doesn’t guarantee you will get in an accident. Driving sober doesn’t guarantee you will get to where you are going alive. All that choice does is change the odds – to your favor or against you.

You make hundreds of decisions every day. What to eat, who to have sex with, whether to have sex, etc. The cumulative impact of all those choices, either in your favor or against you – impacts the quality of your life. The more you choose to do things that improve your odds, the more likely good things will happen to you.

You don’t have a lot of control over what happens to you. But you do have some control. If you want to be successful, it would be stupid to leave your fate totally to chance.  Smart people make choices to improve their odds and they do this consistently throughout their lives.

If you want to learn more about how to exercise more control over your life and to improve your chances of success, however you define that, consider taking Planning for Personal Success – a Humanist Approach online course. Both of these will help you with your personal development.

Sorting Out Your Priorities

How big is your to do list? If it is like mine, you have more things to do than you could possibly ever accomplish. In order to not have this drive you crazy, you have to sort out your priorities.

Sorting out your priorities is easier than you think. The reason most people don’t do it is because they don’t want to have to think or make hard choices. So don’t.

Don’t tackle your to do list yet. First figure out what it is you value. Why do you work? Why do you do what you do?  Is it to feed your family? Is it to have fame and fortune?  What is it that is important to you?  And don’t just list your values, prioritize them. Which of the many things you value are more important that others.

If you are like most people, spending time with your family and friends will be more important to you than having a satisfying job or being famous or wealthy. That is assuming being famous and or wealthy are on your list of things you want for yourself. And if you do – ask yourself why – what is it you want to accomplish by being wealthy and famous – that will help you better understand your true motivations and values.

Once you know what is important to you – truly important to you, you are now in a position to tackle your to do list. Those things that contribute to your main priorities are the things you prioritize in your list.  Yes, you have to balance things and work has to be prioritized because without that you can’t feed or clothe or house your family or yourself.

But if you do this, you will find that a lot of your to do list isn’t actually all that important. And being able to deprioritize tasks helps you sort out your priorities.  If something would be nice to get done, but doesn’t really impact anything if it doesn’t get done, deprioritize it.

The nice thing about this is the more you do it, the easier it gets. When you don’t do something and the world doesn’t fall apart, you will gain confidence in your decisions on what to prioritize and what not to.

And if you make a mistake in your prioritizing and it turns out something was really important, go ahead and reprioritize.  Finding balance in life is an active and ongoing process. Your priorities are changing all the time and the demands being placed on you will change to. What shouldn’t change that much – is your underlying values that allow you to prioritize your to do list in the first place.

Stress Awareness and Humanist Meditation

Stress happens. But you can minimize its impact on you by choosing how you respond.

April is Stress Awareness month. And yes, this is apparently a government recognized thing: http://www.foh.hhs.gov/calendar/april.html According to Federal Occupational Health – “Stress happens. Sometimes it's unavoidable, at times it's unbearable. That's why taking time for yourself is a necessity.”

They go on to say, “While you can't avoid stress, you can minimize it by changing how you choose to respond to it. The ultimate reward for your efforts is a healthy, balanced life, with time for work, relationships, relaxation, and fun.”

I agree, which is why I practice meditation, as a Humanist. It’s why I encourage others to meditate as well. And yes, meditation is one of the ways the government says you can relax and recharge. And if they endorse it, well, it has to be good.

What meditation does for me is it helps me learn how to calm my mind. That’s what meditation is about, learning how to consciously choose your response, even when that response is hard wired into our nervous system like stress is.

What Humanist meditation isn't is a spiritual practice. I don’t become one with the universe. Nothing supernatural happens. I just relax, consciously and become more present and that feels good and that’s reason enough to practice it.

If you want to learn more about Humanist meditation, Humanist Learning Systems offers,  free guided meditations by Rick Heller of the Humanist Mindfulness Group at:  https://humanistlearning.com/humanist-meditations/ 

And if you want to learn more about the science of meditation and what exactly happens in your brain when you meditation, consider taking Humanist Meditation: Answers for Skeptics also taught by Rick:
https://humanistlearning.com/meditation101/ 

Life is Uncertain

And that uncertainty causes a LOT of stress. Here are the ways I handle that as a Humanist.

One of the things I like about what I do is that I get to know people I otherwise wouldn’t. People who have been moved by my writing contact me and we become virtual friends.  One such friend emailed me to let me know she was having a tough time. Her husband had been battling cancer and was in remission and she was finding that she was more upset about it than he was. She worries about what would happen now if he died.

I can relate. I almost did die this year. And then my hubby came down with a bad infection and went to the emergency room a couple of times. My son has even had a couple of visits. Needless to say, the ER staff at our local hospital knows us now.

What I noticed is that when I was the one in the hospital, I wasn’t worried that much. When my hubby went through his turns in the hospital, I was a nervous wreck. What would I do without him?  The very thought makes me sick to my stomach.

And that physical response to the fear of uncertainty and worry is real.  I am very sure that one of the ER visits my husband had was caused by his worrying. He was so unnerved by what happened to me earlier in the year, it has affected him physically.

The problem with fear of uncertainty is that – while I think it’s totally reasonable to be worried about losing someone you care about. That worry can cause health problems and it can incapacitate you and prevent you from getting on with the business of living.

Here’s how I cope and stop my brain from going into overdrive when I start worrying about the worst happening.  I actually have a lot of practice at this and it works.  My husband used to be a travelling salesman. And I used to worry that he would get in an accident on the road. Every day I would worry about that.

I spent my nights trying not to think of all the ways he could die in a traffic accident on a daily basis.  To stop, I created a plan for what I would do if the worst happens.  Just go there. Don’t fight it. Write up a plan for your finances, and what you are going to do to get everything together and move on eventually if he dies. Once that plan is in place, you don’t have to worry about it anymore.  This may seem morbid – but the realism thing really helped me cope with the stress. I’d given my brain what it needed, some assurance that I will be ok even if I was devastated.

The other thing I’ve learned is that I don’t have to be up and positive all the time. Given what I’ve been through and what most people have been through, if you haven’t earned the right to cry – no one has!   My feeling on grief is that you just need to experience it. It involves pain, and crying. And yes, figuring out how to look to the future even when it is uncertain.  Nothing you can do about that really – except accept it.  Serenity prayer – change the things you can – accept what you can’t. Wisdom to know the difference. You can’t know what is going to happen. So you prepare for the best and the worst and move on with life as best as you can.

How do you deal with uncertainty and the possibility of someone you love dying?

Saving Time

You can’t save time, you can only spend it. How can you make sure you spend your time wisely?

In honor of the time change yesterday, I thought I would dedicate this post to the concept of time. Specifically, saving time.  Most of us have too much to do and not enough time to do it in.  Having a time turner would be nice, but it wouldn’t solve our problem. We would just be spending even more time and be even more exhausted.

My favorite quote on this topic is from the Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff:

“The main problem with this great obsession for saving time is very simple: you can't save time. You can only spend it. But you can spend it wisely or foolishly.”

I have always found this quote helpful. Instead of thinking of ways to save time, I need to focus on how to use my time wisely and effectively.  Why, because trying to save time rarely works. It usually results in a lot of wasted time that could have been better spent.

My son is 7 and is learning how to write. Well, how to write legibly so that others can understand what he has written.  He is capable of writing beautifully when he slows down enough to focus on writing properly.

Most of the time though he just rushes through his work to get it done quickly so he can move on to something else that is more interesting to him.  The problem is that by rushing, he actually takes more time to do the task. Why? Because he makes so many mistakes and his work is so messy, we end up erasing the entire thing and making him start again.

The lesson he needs to learn is counter intuitive. By slowing down and taking the time to do it right, he actually spends less time on the task than if he rushes through it.  He also does better work. Slow and steady gets the job done.

My aunt agrees: http://humanisthappiness.blogspot.com/2012/07/slow-down-you-move-too-fast.html

Do you have a tendency to rush things? How do you remind yourself to slow down?