The Illusion of Control
We are continuously striving to understand and grasp the whole of life. We want to control life. We don’t want to be its subjects. We want to be its masters. And with this in mind we have tried to reduce life into data which can be manipulated and over which we can exercise total control. But life is complex. And complexity can never be fully reduced to data. There will always be black swan events like Covid-19 which are totally unseen and unplanned for. Life needs its space to surprise us and make us realise its mystery and awesomeness. No matter how much we might try to erase the mystery out of life it will continue to astound us.
We are a part of life and therefore can never understand the whole of life. Life is not an object outside of us which we can examine, comprehend and control. We need to live and experience it. Understanding life is the booby prize. Life cannot be captured by our finite minds through a finite framework.
And yet we keep trying to control life because of our fear of uncertainty, and the anxiety and insecurity which this causes us. All our efforts to control life result in some form of freezing of life. If life is frozen then we feel we can understand it. Like freezing it into data. Or freezing events which have happened at different points of time and then trying to understand them. This builds up a stock of knowledge. It’s like a stack of case studies, from which we try to study life. They can help to a certain extent. But life is a continuous flow. One can’t capture a flowing river in a bucket. To experience running water one must allow it to run. Life is change. People’s experiences as they flow within the web of life is what makes life a dynamic process.
We can’t experience life as if it were a stock of frozen knowledge. Our experiences are unique. They can’t be standardised nor can they be exhausted. For instance our general experience of snow is very one-dimensional in comparison to the experience of snow which an Eskimo has. Some have estimated that the Eskimo has as many as fifty different words for the different types of snow which he/she encounters. Life is rich within its multiple dimensions. But we try to experience life as per our idea of life which very often is linear.
We interact with the ideas we have of life but not with life itself as it flows. We label our experiences. We freeze them. They now become reference points. For instance, we freeze a pleasurable experience in our memories and keep referring back to it so that we can replicate the very same experience in the future. We will never be able to do it. That moment is gone. And by focussing on it we lose the opportunity to relish the other types of moments which bring us other types of highs because we keep harking back to that one experience and the type of high it gave us. We live in the past and try to recreate the exact same experience in the future. The past and the future become more real than the present. Living in the present moment is the only thing that there is. The past is gone and the future is yet to come.
We do not interact with people but our ideas about them. The labels we put on them. We freeze them. And we refuse to question the labels we put on them. So instead of interacting with a person named Mr/Ms. X or Y, we interact with Mr/Ms X or Y as being a gossiper or being arrogant or being bossy and so on. And thereby box them into artificial categories and do not allow them to grow or change in and through our interaction with them in the present moment. Because we are not open to see and experience anything but the labels which we have attached to them because of our past experience. The labels could connote positive qualities too. We impose our structures onto life and do not allow the spirit of life to emerge.
We need to be open to life with all its panoply of experiences as they happen from moment to moment. The joy of paradox. The richness of complexity. The beauty of its simplicity. If life were to be totally secure devoid of anxiety and uncertainty, it would be very boring. The security of life needs its insecurity as a foil. As light needs darkness and sound needs silence.
