There are times in my life when I need to get out of the way.  I mean that in multiple senses.  There are times when I need to get my hopes and fears to shove over, to be blocked or to be breathed through.  There are times when I don’t have any power at all over a situation, and I need to recognize when that is the case and stop struggling to change the thing I can’t change.

As a weird person, I have had a thing in my head since childhood, telling me the probability of things.  It is not like counting cards in Vegas, though.  It is more like, this person is likely to cheat me and lie to me, or there will probably be an Earthquake in this region within the next 10 years.  Sometimes, I feel the “disturbances in the force” preceding and during mass events.  It is a slippery feeling, and it usually results in my becoming very aware of the things surrounding me, in the fight or flight sense.  I’ve spent a very long time working on my ability to shut the awareness down, because it really doesn’t help my social skills.

There are times when I do have at least a little power over a situation, but I don’t have enough information to make the eventual choice.  I’ve come to recognize the feeling I get when that is the case.  These situations tend to be false dichotomy choices.  A simple example would be: are you going to vote democrat or republican?  The answer is neither.  Sometimes I vote democrat, sometimes I vote republican, sometimes I vote third party or non-partisan, and sometimes I don’t vote at all because all the options are bad, or because the act of voting gives my power or privacy away in ways I don’t want at the time.  The amount of energy I spend deciding a thing needs to be commensurate with the amount of power I have over the thing and its consummate impact on my life or my friends’ and family’s lives.

Sometimes, it is necessary just to wait.  The solution will present itself in time, at least according to the probabilities.  I don’t particularly like the cognitive dissonance of waiting.  Yet, that is where I make a bunch of decisions from, a place of patience and deep thought.  While I wait, I must get out of my own way.  Ruminating and obsessing over a decision I can’t make yet is not very helpful.  There are times I need to distract myself, to move on in my thoughts to another place, to be able to discover the joy again.

Joy.  Joy is a powerful thing, and I can have it anytime.  I don’t have to wait to be joyful.  I don’t have to be perfect to be joyful.  I don’t have to make the right decision to be joyful, even in the midst of despair and loneliness, or shame and guilt.  It is always there, if only I’d just get out of my own way.  Oh, but I have things to do, children to raise.  And climate change/an EMP/nuclear war/hackers overloading and permanently disabling the electrical grid will kill us all and make us go extinct!  Yes, I see you, anxiety and fear.  I wouldn’t live without my anxiety and fear for the world.  They have a very necessary evolutionary purpose, and are valuable in spurring me to get things done.  Yet at the same time, they don’t have to overwhelm me into paralysis.  They don’t ever have to overwhelm me into accepting authority when that authority is misguided and toxic.