Taking Control

There are times when you'll work towards a goal that takes many steps, lots of attention and much patience in order to do well, and sometimes, when you think you have everything in hand, external circumstances come along and throw it all out of alignment, even when you only take your eyes off the prize for a second. It's a highly frustrating experience, more so when it undoes all the blood, sweat and tears you've poured into it, but that's just how life can be. It's not a matter of if it happens, but when, and what you do then defines you'll become as time goes on.

In my case, I tend to throw a mini shit fit, then pick myself up and push ahead with what's left

As for why, I wasn't a generally expressive kid, and that allowed a lot of the emotions people tend to express in tiny puffs to build into a big head of steam ready to emerge at the worst possible opportunity.  Only now, after all the strides I've made to become something greater than who I am now, have I been able to put that energy in a positive direction(although I'm still quite susceptible to moments of inopportune rage). The more I come upon these less than ideal situations, the more I realize both how much I don't control and how much I do, the latter growing more and more apparent as my abilities become more crystallized.

Now that I now what I do control, I've grown a lot more pissed at people trying to take that away, especially when I know damn well what I'm doing.

“Why fight so hard, though?” you may be wondering. “You know that the best way to get things done is to ride the flow and let things resolve themselves, so what's the point?” I admit to thinking like this more than once in my life, and more than once have I thrown my hands up in frustration and felt like nothing I did worked, thinking that maybe the best choice would be to just give up and let the winds take me wherever they may. I mean, why should anyone work so hard to achieve a goal that may not even be all it's cracked up to be and take away more than it give to you?

Because, if all the things I've gained over the years have taught me anything, it's that the effort pays off, and will always pay off if you don't let it get away. 

It's easy to just take the easy way out of things and lead a fairly normal life, things such as not allowing yourself to get to close to other people after a heartbreak in order to avoid further heartbreak, doing just enough to keep whatever job you have and hate so you can keep the essentials in order and eating that apple a day to keep the doctor away, even if it's the only healthy thing you eat all day. Comfort is much easier to attain if you let yourself be content with what, who and where you are now, but I certainly can't remember the last time someone broke through and became something more from a place of comfort.

It's only natural that growth and comfort cannot co-exist, especially within the human spirit.

Had people been comfortable where they were centuries ago, we would never have the net, we would never have modern medicine, we would never have the ability to easily travel the world, the country or even 20 miles outside of where we were born. Growth can be painful and awkward, sometime agonizingly so, but the human heart, mind and body are some of the resilient things this world has to offer, able to patch itself up and grow even stronger more knowledgeable and more awake after each encounter, even as children still developing their conception of the world. Only when we embrace those inevitabilities can we understand how to best use them to help us grow and shape the course our lives take, knowing that, even if it's precisely what we envisioned, it will always come to be more than we ever imagined possible.