picking our battles

We need to ask not only how to make things better but also:

• how to avoid making things worse by our well-meaning efforts
• how to not be driven crazy by frustration, impatience, and setbacks
• how to deal with disappointment and anger
• how to not descend into learned helplessness and/or cynicism
• how to tell the difference between important and unimportant
• when to compromise

It is at least as important to accept what cannot, will not, and/or ought not be changed as it is to work toward changing what seems to need changing. Accepting what I can't change is a process. It starts with the recognition that beating my head against the wall doesn't help anyone, that it usually makes things worse, and that it disables me.

Unfortunately, there is no switch with which I can turn off the compulsive rumination, agitation, and restlessness that won't leave me alone when I feel like I'm not doing enough. Letting go of the need to keep trying to do what can't be done or ought not be done is deeply and perplexingly challenging. The need to abandon futile pursuits is not always apparent and is often unpalatable or even painful. It can feel like being defeated.

There is a paradox involved in letting go. Something is required besides simple resignation.  There has to be a positive choice that offers an alternative to just dancing around the void created by the avoidance of choices that I don’t want to make, but what that positive choice is and how to get there are typically neither obvious nor readily attainable.

It's complicated.

When I recognize that the way I’m approaching things is flawed, there is also an inconvenient, and perhaps painful awareness that new and different choices have to come from somewhere besides the template within which I have always made choices and which is the only way of looking at life that I know. I can’t undo the old by means of the same thinking that produced it in the first place.

My habitual emotional, mental, and behavioral patterns may have been natural responses to what I perceived was going on at the time I adopted them, but I will inevitably encounter situations where they don’t work. Undoing them is not so easy though. It's far easier to avoid, deny, pretend, and forget.

Letting go of what I'm used to creates a terrible sense of vulnerability. That can be compounded by defensive reactions. However, if I allow myself to just feel the feelings, I can begin making peace with the stubborn realities that resist my willpower.

If I can disengage the grueling exercises in futility, the frenetically reactive spinning of my wheels, I can become fully present in the moment, remove energy from whatever it is that drives my fearful reactions, and direct that energy more constructively.

I will eventually sense some part my self that is free to make different choices.   

One of the hardest challenges in this process has to do with the fact that the emotional habits I have adopted are inseparable from my core beliefs about who I am and what my role in the world is. There is no way to change emotional habits without changing the beliefs that create them and no way to change my beliefs without changing myself from the inside out.  

But I  continue feeling the feelings. I begin recognizing my feelings for what they are, conditioned responses. I can choose to respond differently. Having the world be the way I want it to be or having it yield to my efforts to change it is a childish fantasy. Letting go of that fantasy is part of growing up. And I have to keep doing it over and over again.