the world has turned and left me here

trained to control

On the one hand, I've been intentionally without a job for a month and a half now. Which is as weird for me as it is for those of you who know me. Yes, I hear that tone of concern in your voice. It's okay. Thanks, if anything it's actually nice to know by that sense of concern that there are people who give a damn. Anyway, it's strange for me too...I think most of us just aren't ever prepared to control our own lives...we're trained to take control someday, but the training goes on for so long and takes control of us little by little. The impossibility of training someone to control should be self-evident, the phrase itself is a spectacular example of an oxymoron.

So we realize one day that we've lost all our powers of self-control--we've outsourced them, we've surrounded ourself with things which control us. We're vaguely aware of this. Yet we're incapable of taking the control back, only of expressing frustration--the emotion of the controlled, the impotent.

Those of us who do rush headlong towards the day of self-control often make a fatal misstep somewhere. Brisk-moving men come up to us, take us by the arm and lead us to the back room where the rest of our lives are explained to us. We age years just sitting in that room. We come out of the room broken, eyes extinguished, soul already departed from body and lead the life that was explained to us. It was the only way, clearly. The issues of control and our own powerlessness do not occur to us anymore than they would occur to a plant. Unlike those who retain the power of volition, yet refuse to exercise it out of fear, we lack even that volition now. Frustration does not exist. This is the way things are.

But there are some who never get stiff-armed into that back room for openly disregarding their training. Neither do they lose their ability to act freely during those many required years. They stow their willpower away in a flame retardant box and run through the fire. They get to the other side, laugh, and take it out.

Then they control us.

On the other hand...well, that's a post of a different color. :)