Take a holograph, or a broken mirror. Any hologram contains all the information needed to represent the whole. I look into a fragment of a shattered mirror, and I can see my whole reflection.

The truth is holographic. What that means to me is that if I could live any one part of truth, I could live it all. If I could love one person perfectly… If I could forgive just one person completely… If I could be wholly honest with myself for one moment… then I could see a whole new world.

It’s been said that a book of great truth is also holographic, in that it says the same things over and over again. You read one part of it, and it’s like reading all of it.

I believe there are many emanations of the truth. There is love, willingness, service, forgiveness. These aspects of truth shine along an infinite spectrum. One of these expressions is surrender. If I could relinquish control completely, I would experience perfect peace. It’s in the moment that I surrender my desire to manage the world that the world ceases managing me.

It seems that one of the hardest lessons we’re sometimes forced to learn is that we’re not in control. I’ve seen it expressed in all kinds of situations in my own life. I’ve seen others have to learn that lesson, too. It starts the moment we’re born, a process we have no control over and which we’d rather not undergo. It continues with our infancy and childhood, when we’re completely dependent on others. It moves through the different seasons of our lives, and culminates in old age, which has been called the second childhood, when we we’re forced to relinquish everything, from our possessions to our ability to our autonomy. At the end of it all is death. We have no control over the fact of our dying, and so we leave this world as we came into it: with no choice.  The Vikings called it wyrd, their word for fate. The Romans had a saying about it: The fates lead whom they may, but drag whom they must.

This whole Covid thing is a vast lesson of not being in control I can’t control a virus, a miniscule strand of RNA that scientists don’t even know is alive. No one’s in control of this pandemic despite all the science and tech we’ve thrown at it. Probably for the first time in history, every one of us on the planet is faced with the loss of control over so many aspects of our lives, from our medical fate to our economic fate to the fate of our social lives. Still, I have a choice: I can go along with these outcomes, or I can fight them. I may not have a choice over being born or dying, but I can choose how I respond to what happens in between those bookends. I may not have a choice over dying, but I choose how I’ll face it.

Why is it so important that I relinquish control? Because it’s only then that I can experience peace. My ego tells me that I can only have peace on my terms. It tries to convince me that once I have control of my externals – others, my own body, the world – then I’ll be at peace. So, like most people, I spend much of my life trying to fix the outside, believing I’ll be at peace once I have everything outside my skin exactly to my liking.

My experience informs me that the opposite is true: that it’s much easier to adjust my attitude to accept conditions as they are, than to change conditions. Since my attitude (my reactions) are the one thing I always have control over, it’s much simpler and much more realistic to change that than it is to try and change the world, especially with everyone and everything competing against me to remodel the world to their own specifications.

And there may be another reason why I’m not king of the world.  Because it would defeat the purpose of my existence here. If I drove through a city, and all the traffic lights were green, life would be easy, but boring. If I knew everything that was going to happen before it happened, or if I knew that there’d be no problems, no challenges. no bumps on my road when I woke up in the morning, it would defeat the purpose of my life.

I build muscle to the precise extent that I push up against something. I develop persistence and endurance only through the long-distance journey. I attain adaptability and resilience only by climbing the mountain. That’s what evolution is: a response to change, an adaptation to adversity. All of this requires me not being in control. It’s the only way I can learn. It’s the only way I change.

© 2022 by Michael C. Just

Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.

You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23

Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002

Four of his short stories have recently been published online:

Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)

The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW

I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October

Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within