I was sitting in the garden yesterday when a wasp landed on my coffee cup. Not threatening, just… there. And I realized I was holding my breath, as if staying perfectly still might somehow control what it did next. Which is absurd, right? But isn’t that what most of us do with everything?
We spend our lives trying to negotiate with the uncontrollable. We plan meticulously, prepare contingencies, optimize our routines—all in service of an illusion that if we just get the variables right, we can dictate how things unfold. And sometimes it works, which is exactly why the illusion persists.
The problem isn’t that we try to influence our lives. That’s not just reasonable; it’s necessary. The problem is that we rarely admit where the actual boundaries are. We know, intellectually, that we can’t control other people’s thoughts, the economy, or when we’ll die. But we feel like we should be able to. So we carry around this low-level anxiety, this sense that if we’re just disciplined enough, prepared enough, good enough, we can make the world behave.
It doesn’t work that way.
And here’s the strange part: accepting this is actually liberating, not depressing. Once you stop trying to control the uncontrollable, you can actually pay attention to what you can influence. Not control—influence. There’s a difference. You can’t control whether someone listens to you, but you can control whether you speak truthfully. You can’t control whether you get sick, but you can influence your health. You can’t control how long you live, but you can choose how you spend the time you have.
But we rarely do this with full commitment. We half-believe it. We nod along when someone says “worry doesn’t change anything,” then worry anyway. We say “I’ll focus on what I can control,” then spend the evening refreshing our email, hoping for a specific outcome.
I wonder sometimes if the people who seem most at peace aren’t the ones with perfect circumstances, but the ones who’ve genuinely stopped negotiating with reality. Not resigned to it—that would be sad. But accepting it. Like that wasp on my cup. It was going to do what it was going to do, and I was going to decide how I responded. One of those was actually in my hands.
What’s harder than accepting what we can’t control is trusting ourselves to handle what comes. We fear not the loss of control so much as the vulnerability it exposes. If I can’t force an outcome, that means I have to trust something else—my ability to adapt, to survive, to find meaning even when things don’t go to plan.
That’s the real work, I think. Not accepting powerlessness, but developing faith in our own resilience.
What would change for you if you genuinely stopped trying to control one thing you’ve been fighting against?