I’ve been thinking about the choices we make, and the ones we seem to deliberately avoid making, and how they shape everything we see when we look around us. Our culture believes in control – that it is both necessary and reliable – and urges us to seek it. Our drive for control has a way of spreading like a virus into our relationships with our bodies, and our responses to the world, and to how we treat each other, and how we relate to nature – assigning it the role of decoration for our homes and public spaces. When we become adults, we acquire choice over the assumptions we hold onto. I think that’s what adulthood is about. If we choose to hold onto the idea that to be in control is to be safe, we will never quite be able to give ourselves over to life, because we’ll feel we have to keep our distance from it. And so we remain spectators on others and ourselves, anxious about what’s around the next corner. As we habituate to this state, we forget that control is the opposite of harmony. When your concern is to maintain control, you look out at the world and see danger. When your concern is with harmony, you look out at the world and see dance, inviting you to join in.
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