“You Can’t Always Get What You Want…”

c. 2018 Cheryl Kelly

All rights reserved

(9-18)

Life can be unbelievably cruel. It will give you the most incredible highs one moment and then in the blink of an eye, turn around and pull the rug right out from underneath your feet leaving you with the most bitter pain and suffering. Suffering that makes you actually contemplate if death wouldn’t be more bearable. It can give you triumphs that raise you to the highest elevations one day, and the next bring you crashing down into emotional devastation all the while leaving you wondering what just happened. It is this very uncertainty that makes life a challenge...that makes life worth figuring out how to navigate the ups and downs; how to take those highs and learn how to reign them in and capitalize on them and take those lows and learn from them to make them worth all the pain involved.

There are all kinds of advice out there meant to help you try to reason through life’s ups and downs… “when one door closes, another opens”… “things happen for a reason”… “you can’t grasp new things if your hands are full of yesterday’s baggage”. The point being that in life, nothing is certain, and just when you think you have it figured out, the rules change, and you are thrust right back to where you started, or worse, back even further. It never fails, the minute you think you have a handle on things, life reminds you just how naive you truly are as a human being...as if to pat you on the head and say, “silly human, don’t you know by now I’m in control?”. The tough part is learning the art of acceptance. Acceptance of the fact that you aren’t in control, and never will be. But, don’t despair!

You might be thinking, if you cannot control the things in your life, then how do you function, how do you survive, and succeed? I like to equate it to business. It’s all in your management skills. Learning to prioritize, delegate and, at times, when to walk away from a deal or partnership that isn’t efficient or effective. I know, easier said than done, but, if you can take something as complicated as life and break it down a bit, sometimes, you can find a new perspective.

Take relationships for example. You cannot control other people, and you surely cannot control emotions and feelings – they are what they are...but, you can try to manage your responses and your actions. What is difficult is recognizing where to focus your attention, when to know you need help, when to see that things are not moving in the right direction for you or the outcome is clearly not going to be in your best interest, and lastly, when to accept that it’s time to throw in the proverbial towel and move on. No one likes to fail, but at times, failing is inevitable. Especially when you come to the realization that you have nothing left to give, no more strategies left to try.

You can’t always get what you want, and that’s a reality that’s hard to accept at times. That lack of control breeds a feeling of complete chaos and it can be brutal. As a control freak myself, I can say, I’ve been there and it ain’t fun… It can easily send you spiraling down the path of no progress, or worse, down the completely wrong path, and before you know it, you have wasted years trying to make something work that you should have abandoned a long time ago. And those years, you can’t get back. Life, unfortunately, does not give many do-overs.

In the end, life dictates your successes and your failures. Some of those outcomes you can control, and others you can’t. Life would be easy if we knew those outcomes ahead of time so we could direct our actions accordingly, but what fun would that be? All you can hope for is that you can look back one day, sleep soundly at night knowing that your efforts were not wasted. That you made the right decisions for yourself at the right moments, and if you didn’t, you learned from that and you moved forward without regret. I know, it’s a tall order…

Editor’s Note: I like your analogy to business negotiations. As a Libertarian, I have sometimes observed that marriage (or any committed relationship) is basically a business partnership agreed upon by consenting adults. Adding religious or romantic overtones certainly gives it extra glamour, but in real terms, it is a deal between willing parties. As you observe, those can sometimes go bad, or prove to be unproductive. I once had an older friend who said he looked at a potential mate not only in terms of love but also by comparing assets in the relationship. (Personality, life managing skills, etc.) I used to think that was harsh, but reading your column makes me think you have grasped this concept where I failed to learn quickly. Cheers to you, my friend!