Chapter 9
The Locus of Control
I’m serialising my book “The Observing I: A guide to living a more authentic life” on Substack, with a new chapter being released every Wednesday. I’m a big believer that philosophy should be available to the masses, not locked behind paywalls or hidden away in dusty archives. So I’m making my book available here.
This is Chapter 9.
I find myself saying this a lot, but it’s an important point, so I’m going to say it again:
There is only one thing in this universe that you can control, and that is yourself.
Sometimes we approach life from an angle of control. We’ll feel the need to control what others think about us, or what’s going to happen in the future. We’ll expend an inordinate amount of energy and effort on trying to make things go “according to plan”.
There’s a powerful philosophy out there that’s very good at teaching us that nothing really goes to plan, and that we have to get comfortable with accepting things as they come. It’s called Stoicism, and it was very popular back in ancient Rome (although it’s seeing a significant resurgence at the moment).
I’m not going to give you a lesson in Stoicism - there are far more experienced and better writers than me out there who have written some powerful works on the subject. What I am going to do is take a few choice aspects from it that I feel are deeply relevant to the subject of acceptance and control.
Other people’s actions, the weather, the past, the future, whether they’ve run out of double quilted tea tree oil toilet paper in the supermarket or not - all of it, all of these external things lie essentially beyond the reach of our control.
Understanding this idea is the first step to changing our outlook on what happens to us in life. It’s an incredibly powerful way of changing our story, and it’s our story that essentially determines our perspective of events
If I stub my toe on that really badly placed table in the hallway, my perspective of stubbing my toe is that I’ve hit my toe and it fucking hurts. I’m suffering because of it, and I am suffering in the moment. It’s a physical thing that’s happened to me and I am responding in kind.
Psychological suffering is quite different. It’s how we relate to what’s going on in our lives, and is driven by our judgement and perception of those events.
Now, I am going to put a very large caveat here and say that when I talk about psychological suffering, I am not referring to terrible things such as abuse or emotional violence. That’s trauma, and it’s well outside of the scope of what I’m talking about here. We’re keeping this in the realm of the suffering that we bring upon ourselves through our own thinking.
Our perspective, the way that we interpret and react to situations, largely determines our emotional response to that situation. If we believe something is really shit and terrible and unpleasant, we’re very likely going to feel upset or frustrated or angry or afraid in that scenario.
Let me give you an example. I used to get the train into work, commuting from my home in the jungles of Essex into central London. Every morning and evening. Back and forth like a meat yo-yo.
Now, let’s say I’ve got a client meeting booked in for 8am. I get up early, I shower, grab some breakfast. I spent some time the night before preparing for it. I’m feeling pumped. Everything’s going smoothly. I’m going to be on time. I’ve got this. It’s in the bag.
I walk to the station, get through the ticket barrier, and wait a few minutes on the platform. The train arrives, bang on time. I get on, grab a seat, get a book out of my bag and start reading.
Halfway into the journey, the train breaks down on the outskirts of London. I’m stuck. Trapped in a metal tube in the rising heat with the stank of human sweat and air conditioning that’s no longer functioning.
I’m going to miss that meeting. I know that I’m going to miss that meeting. There’s no way that I can jump out and run down the tracks, and there’s no emergency hand car that I can jump on and crank my way into London.
At this point I have a choice, and it’s a very simple one. I can choose to become angry and pissed off that the train has broken down, or I can choose to accept it. What’s important to recognise here is that I have no control over whether the train will work or not. I can’t, through sheer force of will, manifest the train to start running again. So I could sit there and seethe and protest and cause myself all manner of suffering by getting angry at something that is totally outside of my control.
Or, I could acknowledge that I can no control over the situation, quietly accept that this is reality as it stands, and make use of the sudden window of time that I’ve been given.
In these moments, all we can do is take the moment and embrace it. We can’t change it, so why expend energy getting angry at yourself and/or the cosmos? All that does is create suffering, and it becomes us inflicting suffering on ourselves.
Acceptance is a fundamental principle in Stoicism. Instead of expending all of that energy trying to manipulate things that we physically cannot change, we can focus our energy on trying to change the things that we can - our outlook, our perspective, and our way of thinking.
I’ve pulled three key ideas out of Stoicism, and am going to use these as focal points to see how we can better respond to the world around us, and temper our reactions to events that lie outside of our control:
Be mindful of the things that do not matter
Remember that nothing is permanent
Reside in the moment
That first one, “be mindful of the things that do not matter”. That often feels like it gets lost in the fog of human experience. Sometimes it feels like we put way too much weight on things that, on a more rounded reflection, really don’t need it. I know I certainly did.
Do you ever find yourself worrying about shit that really doesn’t matter? It might seem important at the time, but if you were to stop and truly reflect upon it, is it worth getting yourself wrapped up in it?
Let’s imagine that you’re driving home from work and someone on the road cuts in front of you. You could get annoyed by it. You could wave your arms in the air and colourfully describe how their mother touts for business on the banks of the Seine. You might even imagine that you’re in a car chase scene from your favourite Jason Statham movie and decide to re-enact it.
None of this, however, is going to change the fact that the person has already cut in front of you. You can’t control what happened there. What you can control is how you respond to it.
We’ve all experienced anger in our lives, and I am sure that, deep down, we can acknowledge the destructive nature of it. Even today, after all the positive work I’ve done on myself, there are a few things that cause me to become angry.
Wireless home printers are one of them. I’ve done well to not destroy the one I currently have, but I will admit that I’ve colourfully described how it’s mother touts for business on the banks of the Seine.
In Buddhism, anger is considered the worst of our emotions, and one that should be avoided at all costs. A moment of anger can undo a lifetime’s worth of merit, and if you’re into karma and reincarnation, you’ll appreciate this is a really serious thing. No hanging out with the celestial musicians in the realm of the Four Great Kings next time around. You’ll be bumbling about as a hungry ghost or, even worse, a wasp.
We don’t talk about suppressing anger in Buddhism. I’ll admit that it’s one step above losing your shit at someone, but it’s certainly not considered a healthy approach. Anger fundamentally originates from one of two sources: attachment and aversion.
In the example above, the person is attaching a sense of injustice and perceived danger to someone cutting in front of them on their way home. They’re holding on to that attachment, and they’re bringing it home with them.
Like a fire, that anger spreads to those around them. To their partner. Their children. Causing nothing but suffering to everyone in proximity. Except, almost ironically, for the person who cut in front of them in the first place. The cause and focus of their anger escapes unscathed.
We need to put a step in place in the workflow of our mind when it comes to anger. Instead of moving directly from the cause of the anger to the anger itself, we must be mindful of the space in between. This is where we become mindful of our anger. We step back from it and become aware of it, rather than allowing ourselves to become it.
Accepting something doesn’t mean that we have to like it, or that we have to think of it as a good thing — far from it. We may have been made redundant at work, or our holiday plans have been cancelled due to a sudden pandemic. In these moments, we may grow angry at the situation, push back against reality, or deny that anything has even happened at all.
Where does that get us? What does being angry at something we have no control over achieve? All we are doing to ourselves, as Deepak Chopra puts it, is creating “turbulence in our minds”.
When I find myself in trying times, my mind navigates its way to a Stoic workflow that I came across a while ago. It goes like this:
Is your life ok?
If yes, then don’t worry.
If no, can you do anything to change it?
If yes, then don’t worry.
If no, then don’t worry.
Now, that may seem a bit glib, but there’s a lot of wisdom in it. If we have the power to change something, then there’s no need to worry about it. We can affect change. We can influence the outcome.
If we can’t change something, then by accepting it is outside of our control, we realise that there really is nothing that we should worry about. If we grow angry over it, then we become like Sisyphus — eternally pushing the boulder up the hill, only to have it roll back down again.
There is often a lesson to be learned in the things we cannot change. By approaching them with gratitude, rather than animosity, we allow ourselves to grow, to learn, and to walk the path to lasting happiness. To fight against the immutable brings us only suffering, and it’s a suffering that we bring on ourselves. A self-flagellation of the mind.
The next point on our list is recognising that nothing is permanent. This puts a real dampener on our sense of attachment. If we’re aware that whatever it is that we’re concerned with won’t last, then we’re naturally not going to be so fixated by it.
The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius happened to also be a famous Stoic philosopher. He was particularly interested in the impermanence of things, and we can learn a lot from his collective writings, called Meditations.
One of his most powerful, and perhaps terrifying, quotes on the matter is
All things are ephemeral; both memory and the object of memory.
He argues that not only are our experiences temporary, but also our memory of those experiences. Everything we live through, all those things that matter to us in the moment, will eventually fade to nothing.
All of our joys and our fears, our struggles and our triumphs, are but dust and air. For me, that was a deeply unsettling idea to get my head around at first. It took a long time to come to terms with it, because it’s a direct affront to the ego.
Our egos are very good at tricking us into this idea of permanence. They act as both our sense of identity and our need for self-preservation. As far as the ego is concerned, it wants to go on forever, so any notion that might challenge that is often met with a bout of internal conflict.
When we start to think about impermanence, it immediately generates a fear of loss. Loss of possessions, status, people, and even ourselves. These are all things that our ego has developed attachments to in order to define its identity.
As a result, trying to adopt this idea of everything being transitory is a lot more difficult than it sounds. It goes against everything that the ego holds dear. The need for control, or at least the illusion of such. The comfort of predictability. The existential dilemma that arises when the ego has to acknowledge that, one day, it will cease to exist.
I’m going to save the exploration of identity for a later chapter (it gets complicated fast and I want to keep this on point), but take a moment here to think about what it is that you use to define your identity. What springs to mind when you think about who you are, and what would happen to your identity if any of those things were to change?
Ironically, all of these notions of attachments originate in our thinking, and there’s nothing quite so ephemeral and transient as a passing thought. It’s the weight that we give to these attachments that makes it difficult for us to let go. Our grip upon the attachment, and not the attachment itself, that causes us suffering. We can still enjoy something by loosening our grip, by recognising it’s temporary nature. In fact, I’d argue that we can enjoy it more knowing that it isn’t going to last.
There’s a Stoic idea called premeditatio malorum (which means “premeditation of evils”) that can be hugely helpful in combating our attachments. The name implies something far more dramatic, but this practice involves us mentally rehearsing what we would feel like when we lose something important.
Visualise the loss of a job that gives you a sense of status. Or maybe a car that brings you a lot of joy when you drive it. Imagine the mental process that you’d go through when those things that you’re attached to are gone.
Premeditatio malorum is a powerful tool, but like all things, it will take a while for the ideas to settle. Thinking about loss is not something that we’re necessarily taught to do, so it can be tricky to initially apply that idea. If you’re going to try it, make sure you approach it with some self compassion (and that applies to all of these techniques). Give yourself some time to get used to it, and extend yourself some kindness.
The last point to consider is to reside in the moment. As human beings, we have a tendency to become transfixed by what has happened in the past, and what is going to happen in the future. And that’s completely understandable.
The past is the source of who we are, the forge of our experiences. It shapes how we think and feel in the present. Of course it’s going to occupy our thoughts.
Likewise, the future is prescient because we must plan for it. We need to think about what we’re going to do when we retire, or where we’re going on holiday this year. Even down to what we need to get on our next shopping trip.
The problem is that if you’re too focused on the past or the future, then you exist entirely outside of the place where life is actually happening, and that’s right now, in the present moment. Spending too much time in the past or the future are the causes of our worry and anxiety.
Everything that brings us happiness, happens now. In the present. Marcus Aurelius tells us that the shortest way to get to what we want in life is to let go of our past and our future.
If we decide to be anxious about what the future may bring, we bring that potential unhappiness into the present. Likewise, if we fear a repeat of the past, our mind brings any unhappiness from our past into the now.
We need to remember that the past cannot be changed, so we shouldn’t allow it to worry us. In the same way, the future is unpredictable. So why bring a vision of something that might not come to pass into the now to plague us?
Letting go and acceptance are intrinsically linked. There are often times in life where we feel we’ve been wronged by others, or there’s something going on that we wish we could change. In these moments, we have a choice. We can fight against the current, or we can accept that this is reality as it stands.
Acceptance does not just happen overnight (are you seeing a running theme here?). It must be practised. Sustained. We have to build this habit of thought and turn our perspective into a positive one. Don’t become disheartened if you want to accept something but are finding it difficult. It can be challenging. It will be challenging. But like all things, the more we practise, the better we become.
It may help to start with the small things. Say you’re out shopping and the supermarket has run out of your favourite breakfast cereal. Be present in the moment, and accept that this is reality. Don’t be angry at the universe at the absence of frosty flakes, because I guarantee that the universe is far too busy worrying about other things, and all that will happen is you’ll cause yourself suffering.
The important thing to remember is that everything is transitory. This, too, shall pass. Things might not be how you want them now, but that will change.
Accept the moment, for it, too, shall pass.
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