Chapter 19: Huge and invisible

Some things you miss because

they’re so tiny. But some things you

don’t see because they’re so huge.

~ Robert Pirsig

Control is an invisible huge thing.

The urge to control explains a ridiculously wide range of behaviors.  

Often we think of controlling as bossing, bullying or nagging, or a controlling person as someone like Hitler or Trump or Mom.  

But that’s like mistaking the elephant’s trunk for the whole elephant.

We’re controlling whenever we

scratch an itch, 

comb our hair,

mow our lawn, 

salt our eggs, 

spank our child, 

balance our checkbook, 

change channels,

stop at red lights,

vote, 

tell a joke,

punch someone in the mouth, 

flatter someone, 

seduce someone, 

hide our true feelings,

lie,

worry,

obsess,

fantasize,

dream.

You get the idea.

We’re all controlling, and we’re controlling all the time.

We chase control all our lives, waking and sleeping, out in public and deep in the most secret crannies of our minds.  

We chase it consciously and unconsciously, creatively and destructively, wisely and stupidly, from birth until death.

As I said, we can’t help ourselves.  Control-seeking is the default position of our species.

At the same time, because it’s such a given of human experience, we barely notice we’re doing it.

Control isn’t like a tool we pick up and put down.  It’s more like breathing, or blinking, or the way your knee jerks when the doctor taps your patellar tendon.  Constant, automatic, involuntary.

Nor is the wish for control like a faucet we can turn on and off.  An urge to control flows through us continuously, saturates all our behavior and feelings, infuses everything we desire and fear.

It not only drives our behavior, it structures our thinking.  

What is most of our thinking, if not an attempt to somehow change some circumstance, shift some piece of reality closer to what we’d prefer?  What else do you call problem-solving, planning, analyzing, fantasizing, worrying, obsessing?

It also structures our emotional lives. 

Yoga teacher Stephen Cope writes,

Each of us has our own silent War With Reality.  Yogis came to call this duhkha.  Duhkha means, literally, “suffering,” “pain,” or “distress.”  This silent, unconscious war with How It Is unwittingly drives much of our behavior:  We reach for the pleasant.  We hate the unpleasant.  We try to arrange the world so that we have only pleasant mind-states, and not unpleasant ones.  We try to get rid of this pervasive state of unsatisfactoriness in whatever way we can — by changing things “out there.”  By changing the world.[i] 

Like our family conditioning, the idea of control makes up the psychological sea in which each of us swims.

And most of the time we barely notice we’re wet.