The Illusion of Control
Breathe deeply, until sweet air extinguishes the burn of fear in your lungs and every breath is a beautiful refusal to become anything less than infinite.
– D. Antoinette Foy
Whenever I’m asked to pay attention to my breath, there’s always this odd moment when I’m mildly uncomfortable with the prospect. Breathing is just so natural when I’m not thinking about it, but when I am it just seems foreign. If you’ve ever listened to a guided meditation, perhaps you understand what I mean. It’s as if I’m being forced to see how little I actually control — when it comes to breathing, I’m almost always on autopilot. My conscious mind isn’t in the driver’s seat. How many other aspects in my life does this revelation apply to?
There are so many similarities between our relationship to breath and our relationship to our own lives. It can be scary to be gently reminded to pay attention to something, because it means facing the fact that you don’t pay attention to it. And paradoxically, right after realizing that you haven’t been seeing it, you have to consciously let go of it again.
The art of letting go in a general sense is meditative, although it’s far less relaxing in nature. In the middle of 2020, I’ve found that there’s a struggle within me to let go of things. There’s so much I don’t have control over — it seems natural that I’d try to look for it somewhere.
I think I’m realizing something though — meditation is essentially the act of letting go of control to gain control.
Now, I feel the need to clarify what I mean here. In my view, there’s a good kind of control and a bad kind of control. It usually isn’t difficult to tell the two apart. The angry, petulant, belligerent kind of control is more of the negative kind. It’s even more negative when you realize that it isn’t even real.
When you desperately try to hang onto control, you’ve already lost it, and you’re headed down a road of self-destruction at the very least.
Often, the good kind of control doesn’t look like stereotypical control at all; it’s relaxed, open to other people and confident in itself. It doesn’t seek to take what it doesn’t own because it owns everything already.
I’m not an expert on this kind of thing at all, but it seems to me that meditation is a way of losing your false sense of security in order to gain the real thing.
Writing is an act of meditation, really. Even writing this post is meditative in its own way — I know it won’t be super polished or profound or anything like that. It won’t be as eloquent as I’d like for it to be. I’m publishing it anyway, because the message matters to me. The simple act of putting my ideas into this post, however incomplete, is cleansing. Pneuma is taking its course in and out of me as I type this… I owe it my life and my talents. I always will.
I guess there’s not really a discernible beginning or end to this post. It’s like a poem in that way… that’s what I’m best at, after all. I just wanted to get these ideas about breath out in the ether. And really, it makes sense, doesn’t it? Can you remember your first breath when you woke up this morning? What about the one you just took? Life isn’t lived in a straight line. At least, that’s my excuse for this meandering and unfinished post.
Keep breathing, and keep paying attention — especially to yourself.
-D.
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