Degrees of Control

Control is a pretty meaningless word. Control what? People, circumstance… yourself? No, what people are really talking about when they talk about control is mostly about comforting themselves, or whining about how they’re uncomfortable because they lack it. But it’s bullshit, a bad joke, and that’s all it really is. You can talk about it in ‘degrees’ if you want, but why not just call it what it is? Influence. Power. The only way ‘control’ factors into it is in degrees, and anything you want to learn, any related skill, can be learned by experimentation with your own influence.

What people call self-control is, more often than not, developed from firsthand experience and application of power, testing how far yours reaches, how much you can sustain and expand it, and how to do that effectively. Focusing on control itself though, reminds me of the idea that developing ‘dark traits’ – such as those outlined by Paimon in Traits of a Dark Warrior – can be done by having a list of traits to aspire to, and doing ones best to cultivate them. Sure you can try, you can even succeed I guess, but you’re missing the fucking point.

If you resonate with darkness then there are no extra dark traits you need beyond the ones you have and the ones that grow naturally from the qualities that are already present. It’s the same thing with “control”; it’s a word slapped onto something others perceive but fail to understand, seeing it as the thing itself when all it is, is an indicator. Instead of tracing it back to where it actually sprang from, what it’s indicative of, they focus on the “control” itself. As with dark traits, what people see as “control” doesn’t usually (if ever) truly develop out of striving for control itself – that’s not the heart of it. It’s power, and power is built on passions, on those needs you have to satisfy.

“It’s like a finger pointing away to the moon. Don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.”~Bruce Lee

As long as your focusing on one of the branches, you’ll never see the tree they grew outwards from. Or as Bruce Lee put it, if you concentrate on the finger, you won’t experience the divinity at the heart of it – and unlike the moon, it’s not far away or even all that difficult to see if you stop forcing things for yourself, over-thinking, trying to do this or that, and do what comes naturally to you. It’s in your heart. These traits, these distracting jokes, are either something you eventually learn to see past, or it’s something you get hung up on (in which case, well, it sucks to be you), never realizing that the finger you can’t look past is a middle finger, and if it belonged to anyone they’d be laughing at you. Besides…

“If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.”~Mario Andretti