We're not in charge

The great majority of us believe we're in control of our own lives. It's our thought processes and our decisions and our abilities that either push us towards success or plunge us towards failure. We decide what we do, what we think and how we act.

But most of us discover sooner or later that we're really NOT in charge. Hirings, firings, success, failure, good relationships and bad ones are often as much or more of someone else's decisions than our own.

A good friend of mine's wife left him not long ago without notice. He didn't know anything was wrong. In fact, he thought things were pretty perfect. But she was doing things he didn't know about and one of those things was re-igniting an old romance that led her to leave my friend for this other person. As a result of that, she was happy, he was sad and he knew there was nothing he could do about it. During that time, he wasn't in charge of his own happiness, she was. And now she's not in charge of her own happiness, someone else is.

Another friend had an almost four-year relationship with a woman he described as his soul-mate. Whenever he mentioned her name, his face would light up. He said he had looked his whole life for someone like her and had finally found her. I didn't see them together often but when I did, there was a look of love and commitment on both their faces that you don't see very often. Away from her, there was a joy in his eyes and a bounce to his step and I was convinced they would marry each other and live happily ever after. But after almost four years, she broke it off as quickly as she had started it and left him emotionally shattered and alone.

This friend of mine has always been a giver instead of a taker and there's no doubt that he would have provided her with everything she ever needed or wanted but evidently that wasn't enough. As in the first case, things were going on in her mind and in her life that he didn't know about and those things finally won out over him. He found out he wasn't in charge of his own happiness, she was. And she's not in charge of her own happiness, someone else is.

I've seen the same thing happen with people who are laid off or fired from their jobs. In many instances, they thought they were doing what they were supposed to be doing but because the boss didn't like them or he had someone else he liked more that he wanted to put in that position, they were let go. Because of that, their lives changed drastically and in some cases, permanently but the boss wasn't worried about them, he was concerned only with his own success and future which means he wasn't in charge of his own happiness, someone else was.

I watched a PBS Frontline story the other day about homeless children in America. How millions of them don't know where their next meal is coming from or where they're going to sleep and how half of the single mothers in the United States are living below the poverty level and their failings make life almost impossible for their kids.

The mothers who were interviewed all appeared heartbroken at the condition of their lives and stated that they wanted their children to have a better life than they had. But the seeds are already planted and the chances of that happening are small.

Are the mothers in that situation there because of bad choices they made or choices other people made that they had no control of? Some of both I'm sure but we seldom make bad choices on purpose. When we decide to do something, we've convinced ourselves that it's the right thing to do. We only find out it wasn't when we suffer consequences we didn't see coming.

Everything we do, every choice we make alters the course and direction of our lives. When we take the easy way out, it often turns out not to be the easy way at all but the wrong way. Sometimes we have that rare opportunity to right a wrong and do what we should have done to begin with but often we don't.

Because somebody else is more in charge of our lives than we are.