Wherever you go, there you are

Reality cannot be avoided, which makes it interesting and terrifying.

We like to pretend we are in control of our lives. Being out of control causes anxiety. One tactic to avoid this anxiety is to pay attention only to those aspects of reality that we do control and to block out those aspects of reality that we cannot control.

One problem with this tactic is that we lack self-knowledge. Very few of us actually know what we are capable of achieving. We make educated guesses about our capabilities and our preferences. But the only way to ensure that our guesses are accurate is to put them to the test. Are we able to control what we think we can control? This is easier to test. Are we truly unable to control what we think we cannot control? This is much more difficult to test.

In order to test that we are truly unable to control something, we have to experiment. We have to venture toward the imagined limits of our capabilities. It is only at the edge of what we think we can accomplish, that we can glimpse the possibility that we can accomplish more than we realized.

But at this border, we face our anxiety. In fact, our anxiety defines the border of what we think we can control. In order to grow, we need to push through this anxiety, tolerate it, while putting our capabilities to the test. This is difficult, but not impossible.

Try it.