Picture Credit – Jeannie Selda
“You’re overthinking because you really care what happens next. You don’t want to fail, and you don’t want to let people down. But no amount of planning, worrying, or over-analyzing can give you control over what happens next. Breathe. Loosen your grip. Experience life as it comes.”
– Michell C. Clark
Let’s play a little pretend, shall we? (Tongue firmly in cheek! I don’t know anyone like this, of course.)
Picture someone home with the dog/cat, the laundry, the cooking and cleaning, with what seems like a mountain of shoulds and have-tos. Doesn’t it feel like a jail sentence some days? Like you can reach fulfillment or meaning with all this ‘stuff’.
Or maybe it’s bigger than the house. Your whole country’s political system feels broken, and the media keeps handing you reasons to distrust the very humans you love or you need to take sides. Either way, the feeling is the same: I will be free when THIS changes.
Now let me tell you about someone who was actually locked up. Dr. Batmanghelidj, a brilliant physician and scientist obsessed with the biology of hydration, was thrown in prison in the Middle East when a dictator seized power. No lab. No research funding. No freedom, by any definition most of us would recognize. It looked like his life’s work was over before it began.
While incarcerated, he met a fellow inmate doubled over in agony from a peptic ulcer. No medical supplies. None at all. So he gave the man two glasses of water. The pain vanished within minutes. Astonished, Dr. B spent the rest of his nearly three-year imprisonment studying the effects of water on over 3,000 inmates suffering from stress ulcers, concluding that so much of what we call chronic illness is really the body’s local cry for hydration. He lived his passion inside a cell. When he got out, he wrote the book: Your Body’s Many Cries for Water.
Here’s what his story handed me: the ultimate freedom, honestly. Freedom isn’t circumstantial. It’s a choice. It’s the ability to choose, not the ability to rearrange your circumstances until your ego finally feels comfortable. Dr. B didn’t need the walls to disappear to do his life’s work. He just needed to choose, inside the walls he had.
I think about him every single day I focus on my blessings, including the ones my ego insists aren’t blessings at all.
So today… dogs, laundry, politics, whatever your particular jail cell ‘de jour’ is, ask yourself: am I waiting for the circumstances to change, or am I choosing freedom right where I stand?
Be free! You are the one who gets to orient yourself to your reality. NOBODY CAN TAKE THAT AWAY FROM YOU.
That which you are against, jails you. Not your circumstances.
That question alone can crack a door wide open.