You can’t get around your need for assurances of control. “Hand me the remote, please.” “See what’s on channel 43.” “I’ll drive.” “You’re tailgating!” “Sam, if you want, I will cut the hedge every other month; it is, obviously, right on the property line.” Direct control or indirect control, there’s a difference, of course, but the key is the word control. You might not like the controller; you might even fear the controller. In such instances of dislike or fear, you probably want to replace external control with internal, self-control. “I,” you think, “should be the ultimate controller of my own destiny.” “I,” you think, “should be master of this place.”
The alternative to some kind of control can be more limiting or frightening than being under another’s control: Chaos, chance twisting among sharp debris in a tornado, turbulent tossing on a paddle-less raft near boulders in a white water stream. Without some sort of control, your specific future varies between being The Great Unknown and The Great Hypothesis--dark hallways with random holes in the floor. Stepping into those hallways doesn’t provide any sense of security or safety.
The reality, of course, is that having control is different from needing it. Often, control over action and place is in the hands of someone else, the pilot, the train engineer, the taxicab driver, the criminal, or the cult leader. We’re left individually with partial control in many places and at many times when control is reduced to the decision to take a plane or train, the decision to flee or fight, or the decision to reject or follow. You can hypothesize the future actions of others but you can’t be sure.
If there is a need to control, you need to understand how it plays out in your life and how it affects others. This is a question greater than “Who trims the hedge between two yards?” However, there is an analog in a property boundary. The brain practices a continuous geometry of recognizing or making shapes and boundaries in life, and that geometry manifests itself as a personal geography. You are a map-maker who has spent years drawing property lines between places beyond your control and places within your control. You draw maps not only of actual place boundaries, but also of emotional, mental, philosophical, political, and spiritual boundaries. Either you let the neighbor cut the hedge, or you cut it. Ownership of the hedge can be either a spoken or an unspoken agreement that entails an unspoken geography of shapes and boundaries.
Your mental cartography frames the limits of your control over every aspect of life save one: The Great Hypothesis. On your map of The Great Hypothesis you are little different from the cartographers of the past who wrote, “Here there be dragons,” beyond the boundaries that delimited their knowledge and control.
Maps are, regardless of their limitations, relatively good guides, if not into the unknown, then up to its very boundary. So, like so many others, you daily map to the borders of Chaos and Hypothesis. Without complete control you take a step into the margin marked, “Here there be dragons,” and that step eventually makes the Great Hypothesis into a proven shape with identifiable boundaries. Remember that your need for control doesn’t have to prohibit you from taking that first step to survey the unknown or walk into the midst of chaos. You crossed that map margin yesterday and the day before. Maybe occasionally, you encountered a dragon, but here you are, having made it safely through to today.
The alternative to some kind of control can be more limiting or frightening than being under another’s control: Chaos, chance twisting among sharp debris in a tornado, turbulent tossing on a paddle-less raft near boulders in a white water stream. Without some sort of control, your specific future varies between being The Great Unknown and The Great Hypothesis--dark hallways with random holes in the floor. Stepping into those hallways doesn’t provide any sense of security or safety.
The reality, of course, is that having control is different from needing it. Often, control over action and place is in the hands of someone else, the pilot, the train engineer, the taxicab driver, the criminal, or the cult leader. We’re left individually with partial control in many places and at many times when control is reduced to the decision to take a plane or train, the decision to flee or fight, or the decision to reject or follow. You can hypothesize the future actions of others but you can’t be sure.
If there is a need to control, you need to understand how it plays out in your life and how it affects others. This is a question greater than “Who trims the hedge between two yards?” However, there is an analog in a property boundary. The brain practices a continuous geometry of recognizing or making shapes and boundaries in life, and that geometry manifests itself as a personal geography. You are a map-maker who has spent years drawing property lines between places beyond your control and places within your control. You draw maps not only of actual place boundaries, but also of emotional, mental, philosophical, political, and spiritual boundaries. Either you let the neighbor cut the hedge, or you cut it. Ownership of the hedge can be either a spoken or an unspoken agreement that entails an unspoken geography of shapes and boundaries.
Your mental cartography frames the limits of your control over every aspect of life save one: The Great Hypothesis. On your map of The Great Hypothesis you are little different from the cartographers of the past who wrote, “Here there be dragons,” beyond the boundaries that delimited their knowledge and control.
Maps are, regardless of their limitations, relatively good guides, if not into the unknown, then up to its very boundary. So, like so many others, you daily map to the borders of Chaos and Hypothesis. Without complete control you take a step into the margin marked, “Here there be dragons,” and that step eventually makes the Great Hypothesis into a proven shape with identifiable boundaries. Remember that your need for control doesn’t have to prohibit you from taking that first step to survey the unknown or walk into the midst of chaos. You crossed that map margin yesterday and the day before. Maybe occasionally, you encountered a dragon, but here you are, having made it safely through to today.
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