I’ve spent most of my life being good at control. Forty years in helping professions (psychotherapy and criminal justice) has fostered a sense of needing to control the environment around me. You develop a kind of professional vigilance — always scanning, always planning, always preparing for the next thing that might go wrong. I had mistaken vigilance as being normal behavior.
It had taken me a long time — and a few situations that I couldn’t manage my way out of, in order to get to a point of understanding the difference between influence and control. I had unknowingly performed a lot of the first. I had none of the second.
There’s a phrase that floats around most recovery circles, spiritual communities, and self-help groups: “turn it over”. People usually mean: let go of what you can’t control. Hand it to something bigger than yourself. Stop white-knuckling it.
I’ve heard it hundreds of times. I’ve said it. I now realize that I didn’t fully know what it meant for me — because the traditional framing assumes there’s a someone to hand it to. Very seldom have I had a supernatural rescuer.
What I’ve landed on, after sitting with the wisdom traditions that I carry in my blood – which I believe has been passed down from my Choctaw and Chickasaw ancestry, is this: “turning it over” doesn’t absolutely require belief in a deity, or even if you do believe, “turning it over” doesn’t have to imply that if you just pray to God, that the problem will be taken away from you, nor is it a guarantee that the outcome will be desirable. Instead, I now understand that I am allowed to believe in a principle that is much simpler and that is: I am not the center of the universe, and that the universe was operating just fine before I started trying to run it.
The Stoics called it amor fati — love of fate. This is not the same thing as passive or hopeless resignation, but instead it is an active acceptance of what is. The Taoists called it wu wei — effortless action, moving with the current rather than against it. My ancestors learned it by observing nature and patterns: the river doesn’t force its way to the ocean. The river finds the path of least resistance and arrives anyway.
All three traditions arrive at the same place through different doors: there is a natural order to things. Your job is not to override it. Your job is to align with it.
Because of my heritage, I refer to the way of the universe as the Great Spirit. To me, sometimes I do not necessarily view it as a supernatural figure making decisions about my life. Instead my perspective holds that it is something more akin to the observable fact of interconnectedness — a set of properties and principles in which forces that are greater than any individual are always at work. An inference from this system is that when I exhaust myself trying to control outcomes that aren’t mine to control, I am working against the current. The current typically wins.
I’ve watched people whom I love struggle with issues and life circumstances that I couldn’t fix. Many times, I have sat in rooms and listened to the suffering that I couldn’t absorb nor redirect. I’ve had to practice — and I mean really practice (imperfectly and repeatedly), the discipline of turning it over.
The way this looks like, for me, isn’t poetic. “Turning it over” looks like acknowledging, (sometimes out loud or in writing – often with great emotional pain), that something is beyond my reach. I have to ask: “What is mine to do here, and what isn’t?” I must find the next right action — small, concrete, within my actual sphere of control — and then let the rest be.
Marcus Aurelius asked himself, constantly: “Is this within my control or not?” If not, he practiced releasing it. Not because he didn’t care. Because he understood that suffering over the uncontrollable is just a second wound we inflict on ourselves.
Here’s what I’ve noticed: the moment I genuinely turn something over, I don’t feel as helpless, because I know that the problem is not mine to fix. Things become clearer. The energy I was burning on anxiety gets redirected toward some action that I can actually take.
I must say, however, that often the fear stays. I want to be honest about that — it doesn’t vanish. However the fear will often cease to be in charge. It doesn’t totally debilitate me.
Whatever your framework or belief system is: God, the universe, the Tao, nature, the recovery community you walk into on Tuesday nights, the long arc of history — the practice underneath all of it is the same: acknowledge what’s bigger than you, clarify what’s yours to carry, and put down what isn’t.
You don’t have to believe the same things that I believe in order to try that. You just have to be willing to admit you’ve been holding something that was never really yours to hold.
That willingness is where it starts.
What’s one thing you’ve been trying to control that might need to be released? Sit and ponder on that question for a moment. Next time that you are in a tough situation, ask yourself, “What part of this is mine to carry, and what isn’t?” Further, when you find yourself having to make a tough choice, observe where life is pulling you, go in that direction. Turn it over.