I used to live under the false notion that I was the author of my life—that I had some sort of supreme control of my destiny. And then, I woke up. And when I wiped the sleepiness of self-delusion from my eyes, I saw clearly that most of the events of my life were not at all of my choosing and that even at my most powerful, I was at best the co-author of my life.
Of course there are some things that we all have some control over such as where we live, who we are friends with, marriage, babies, etc.
Where we are misled by our rather arrogant self-help culture is in thinking that our wishes for how those friendships, marriages, careers, etc, will evolve will somehow trump the energy of life itself.
So, we can spend a lot of time being unhappy about how life isn’t cooperating with our plans, pushing against the natural rhythms of our lives, perplexed as to why it’s not all working out as we have written it.
Or we can relax into the knowledge that it’s not the events our lives that define us; it’s how we react to them.
This is true of the people we tend to most admire and even hold up as role models. Martin Luther King Jr. reacted to the racism of his time in a profoundly powerful
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