Ash Wednesday, for me, is about awareness of my impermanence. I have let that percolate for a couple of days, and it took little thought to get to the next step: unpredictability.

Not only is my life time-limited, my life’s end is unpredictable. It is out of my control. I may reach a ripe old age, not too old and not too ripe, I hope, or I may not finish this short essay before life leaves my body. Life is extremely durable and tenacious. Every system in the body is geared toward survival and toward helping the other parts of the system survive as well. But life is also consummately fragile and can come to an end with head-jerking suddenness.

control 2017Realizing life’s unpredictability brings up a particularly troublesome beef I have with the little matter of CONTROL. My beef with control is that I have so little of it. I have plenty of illusions about control. I invest plenty of energy into trying to be in control of things, and I have wasted untold days worrying about my lack of control.

If control were a person, our relationship would be intensely intimate, perpetually conflictual, and highly codependent.

I suspect this will be the theme of many of my Lenten posts, because this particularly Lenten season comes at a time when my control, or lack thereof, is of particularly salient to me. I’ll say more about that as we go along.