The world is a strange place. Literally anything can happen, and that includes good and bad things. With the good and bad happening every day, one can start to attribute this good and bad happenings to the world. We thank the world for the good things, we blame it for the bad. But what if it wasn’t like that? Is the world doing these good and bad things, or do things just happen and we perceive it as the world doing it?
We like to believe that we have complete control over our decisions or our destiny, but that’s not entirely true. People tend to not to factor in luck. Sometimes, you’ll do all of the right things and still not get to where you want to go. To put it plainly, that’s just life.
But sometimes it’s hard to see that things happen for a reason, whatever that reason may be, and sometimes it’s going to be hard to accept. Similarly to how we perceive the bad things going on in the world as the world’s fault, we perceive our own failures and frustrations as someone’s fault. Sure, we might not always toss the blame at someone, but sometimes we do.
I used to believe that everything that went wrong in my life had to be someone’s fault, even my own. For example, I thought it was my own fault that I was struggling in my math and science classes because I was somehow stupider than everyone else. I would get frustrated at my inability to understand chemistry and calculus without endless hours of studying, and I would label myself an “idiot.” But that wasn’t the case.
It took me a while to realize, but I just wasn’t as math and science savvy as my classmates and just because I can’t understand math or science that well doesn’t mean that it’s somehow my fault that I’m not smart enough. I just wasn’t good at it and I had to accept that unfortunate circumstance.
But for some of us, accepting an unfortunate circumstance isn’t in our vocabulary. We were born and raised to believe that no matter what we are in control of what happens to us, that we are the sole captain of our ship christened “Destiny,” and that we can go wherever our rudder points us. If we can’t get through the treacherous sea, then it’s somehow either our fault that we aren’t skilled enough or the world’s fault for being so difficult. The reality of this, however, is that we just simply cannot be in control of everything. Some of us are good at math and science, and some of us are not. Some of us are lucky and fortunate, some of us are not.
I’m not saying that we have absolutely no control of our Destiny and that we should succumb to whatever the world throws at us. What I’m saying is that sometimes, there is only so much we can control as human beings. We can steer the ship, hoist the sails or drop the anchor whenever we’d like, but we can’t control the tides or the sea storms. Though it’s difficult to relinquish some control to the cold, untamable sea, we must remember that we still have control of the ship and that there has been definitely more than one instance of a ship surviving a terrible storm.
