Don’t Change a Thing (Except You)

So, what if things really are that bad? You aren’t playing victim to avoid consequence; you’re pinned to the wall. The job gone, credit score cratered. Reality has made a joke of your good looks and wit. Your addictions eat away the hours. Love laced up steel-toe boots and kicked you in the heart. Whatever it is, there is no obvious answer, no escape hatch. The pain is real and well supplied. Positivity reads like chalkboard nails and the future like a wasteland.

Our first instinct is to find out who did this to us and tell it a thousand times to anyone who will listen. Fair enough. None of us got here alone. To live among other people, with their own ideas and motives, is a risk we take every day. But we can’t do anything about “them.” If we can make the problem us, then we have a shot. Not because that’s factually correct (although it might be), but because it’s the only place from which we can change. And not in a syrupy martyr way, but in a rebellious, this situation won’t own me way. Nothing out there needs to change, not them, not the situation. The pivot happens in the mind: we look directly at it, and at what it says about us.

We don’t have to deny what’s happening, we just need to reestablish our ability to direct our lives regardless of it. We don’t need to blame them and we don’t need to be blameless ourselves. We aren’t stooges, we took a risk and it didn’t pay off. Someone’s self-interest collided with ours. Not malice, just life.

Even when we’re sure it’s them, deep down, something in us allowed or invited this. Some part of us knew. We let old reflexes trip us. We went silent when it suited us. We decided they owe us something. We knowingly take the risks, so we own the outcomes. It’s how we become the flipper, not the pinball.

We can still move the rudders of our micro choices and mindset toward what we can control, caring only about our possibilities and nothing for winning. Our lives have to be more than a reaction, more than another rebound losing air. After years spent on their part, we switch to ours, and only ours. That alone extricates us from the role of victim. We’ll never change the past, but the trajectory of our lives can turn on that switch. In the mind, the shift is immediate. Out there, the results take time, but circumstances have no choice but to catch up.

In the context of all time and infinite space, “it’s not that serious” can be useful because it’s true. It’s not serious. It’s certainly not permanent. It’ll be over later today, or this year, or in forty years. In the meantime, it’s a game, one we’re awake enough to play on purpose, if we can get a clue. We don’t control how much time we get to play, we can’t control each other’s moves, and we don’t decide whether we win or lose in the end. We let the other players play. We control only the moves we make in the microsecond that will have been our lives.