What Can We Control?

What Can We Control?

For those of us who want some control over our lives, just what can we control?

It seems to me there are three things we should start with:

1.)  We can control what we put in our mouths.  What we eat, what we drink, and what drugs we take are things we can all control.

And we need to be more conscious of what we put in our mouths.  Doing this will largely give us control over our physical health, which is priceless.

2.)  All adults have some control over who touches their physical bodies. We can protect ourselves from unwanted physical touch.

Physical touch can be either  positive or negative.  Removing ourselves from the physical proximity of negative people is something we can all exercise more control over, if not totally, then we can minimuze it.

3.)  It is possible, I believe to control the thoughts that we entertain in our minds.  We might not be able to keep a thought from entering, but we can, with a great deal of effort, learn how not to entertain thoughts that make us feel "bad."

A couple of quotations from Bertrand Russell are appropriate here:

"The wise man thinks about his troubles only when there is some purpose in doing so; at other times he thinks about other things, or if it is night, about nothing at all."

"The man who can center his thoughts and hope upon something transcending self can find a certain peace in the ordinary troubles of life which is impossible to the pure egoist."

How to learn to do this is the topic for another post.

What about our feelings, can we control them?  Also, a topic for another post.

What we cannot control are what anyone else thinks, feels, does, or believes.

Once we get this through our heads, we can productively spend out time on things we have some control over.