nov 3

It's been such a process coming to terms with everything that's beyond my control. This includes almost everything beyond some subtle shifts in my own attention, and even this is arguably beyond my control in a certain sense.

There have been so many things around me that I've seen as wrong and in need of improvement, but whenever I've tried or really thought it through, I've found the situation ultimately insoluble. Every solution only creates or makes way for new problems. Eventually the only viable option left is to let go and return to working on myself and on, essentially, detachment from these external circumstances and outcomes. Back to working on letting go of all of it, which I'll eventually be forced to some day anyways. This whole world, which seems so important and substantial, will one day vanish like a soap bubble at the moment of bodily death. What follows, if anything, remains to be seen, but it won't be this.

So far my attempts to help and change things have been abject failures. Utter wastages of so much time and energy. Wearing myself away and accomplishing nothing. Just frittering this life away, thinking I'm getting somewhere for a time until the truth dawns that I haven't improved a thing. The world continues to turn and its inhabitants continue to suffer in some form or other regardless of what changes on the surface. It's the way the world is.

Directly trying to change or fix things doesn't work. This is a fact that I once saw as overly cynical or nihilistic, and its only over time that it becomes clear. The world is as it is. People are as they are. They don't change or heal by my actions or efforts, but only in their own time and in their own ways. The only thing I can change are my own feelings, my own perceptions, my own choices. And even those by letting go of them. That's pretty much it. I can let go, and let go, and let go. In my own consciousness, my own mind. And as I do, my experience of the world and others changes in ways I can't yet predict, because I'm always limited to my current state of consciousness, always confined by that which I've known and continue to hold onto.

One day I'll die and this will all vanish into nothingness. All the things that I wish would go away will likely be here until that day. In fact they'll likely grow by then. So all I can do is work on letting go of my own fear, my own trembling, my own resistance, frustration and despair, my own beliefs. So I can face and be with the world as it really is, without being overwhelmed by it. And without being distracted from all the beauty I could otherwise encounter in this fleeting experience of a life.