Your heart beats, the blood flows, capillaries repair themselves. Your lungs breathe. Your digestion performs the entire complex of digestive demands from start to finish. The cut on your skin heals itself. Your nerves communicate. Your senses hear, taste, touch, smell, and see. Your sexual apparatus does its thing in response to hormones which you don’t generate. Your muscles do the walking, the lifting, the stirring.
Where did we ever get the idea that we are in control? We do almost nothing except observe, and decide some of our actions. I wouldn’t know how to tell muscles to lift something, and I certainly couldn’t choreograph the action. I think it; it happens. Wow.
And those are just the basics. Refined activities are even more impressive. When I play the violin or viola, I tell my body to create some effects, and it does (after I practice enough to help it figure out what’s required). I imagine the sound of the next note; I imagine the shift; my brain hears the tone and feels the distance, and there it is. Who’s in there doing this??
I like emphasizing how little I control, because I grew up feeling more responsible than I ever could have been. My mother’s mental health was my job (I believed). Pleasing people, getting them to “see” me and “love” me, were on me.
I’m very tired, so it’s a relief to realize I never had to do any of those things (or the myriad others I imagined were mine to accomplish). I breathed and slept and moved; my heart kept beating and nourished my brain; the nerves communicated throughout my body. Everything else is dessert. Fun, but not necessary to survival.
Yes, I worked, to use my abilities and to earn money. Gotta eat, stay out of the rain, wear clothing, and keep me and the rest of things clean enough, and it all costs money, or effort, or both. But I didn’t have to endow work with all that extra meaning about my worth. I have as much or as little worth as the next person — I’m alive, and trying to stay that way for as long as I can (comfortably).
If I have some talents, I’m pleased, but I didn’t create them. No credit due me. “You don’t decide the cards you’re dealt; you do decide how to play them.” I hope I’ve played mine well, and I’m hereby giving up trying to control anything else.