Reality doesn’t have to speak my language

I have been trialling a simple question-and-answer process for dealing with reality more honestly.

The questions are deliberately ordinary: What is actually happening? What do I know for certain? What am I assuming? What am I feeling? What am I afraid might be true? What else could be true? What is within my control? What isn’t?

I noticed something while answering them.

I know very little about very little. My mind likes stability and safety. It can turn feelings into facts and uncertainty into something that needs resolving. Sometimes I find myself responding not only to what is happening now, but also to something familiar from the past.

And yet my immediate action is usually much simpler than my mind suggests.

Reality itself does not appear to need my permission, interpretation or management. It is already in alignment with itself.

What I can control is much smaller: my immediate action, my response, what I do next.

Perhaps this is where my relationship with reality has always been difficult. I don’t converse particularly well with it. I want answers, stability and safety. Reality offers none of these on demand.

The unresolved question, then, is not how to become better at controlling reality.

It is whether I can become comfortable with not conversing well with it.

Perhaps I don’t need to understand reality perfectly to live within it.

Perhaps I just need to stop insisting that it speak my language.