Saratoga News

Point of View

Carl Heintze

Maintaining control of oneself is enough

The other day a family member who shall remain nameless told me I'm trying to exert too much control.

"You've got control over your own life," this person said. "That's it. So enjoy it, but don't try to control anyone else's."

By that I presumed they meant theirs. Well, as perhaps you might guess, that was kind of a soul-shaker.

As a result I've spent a lot of time over the past week thinking about control, about controlling others and about whether I'm truly in control of my own destiny, let alone that of others. My conclusion: I'm not really in control of much of anything--myself, my temper, my appetite and especially of others toward me.

To paraphrase the poem, "I am not the master of my fate, I am not the captain of my soul."

Indeed, it has been a long time since I managed to exert any control over anyone in my family. I never really controlled much of anyone when I was working. In the military, where control means a lot, I shrank from it, a trait that pretty much kept me in the ranks, out of sight.

My attempts to control my children ended about the time they entered their teen years, the first time they told me that "you just don't understand." There also were implications somewhere around the time when they entered high school that I was just too old to know what the young thought or to understand why they did what they did (stay out until 3 a.m., for instance).

After that I admit I may have been guilty of attempting to control things by indirection, like withholding an allowance. It never worked very well.

Oh, now and then, too, I may have suggested that my grandchildren might have been raised slightly differently, as for instance: "You paid how much for that for them?" and so on. But that never worked either.

When I mentioned child-rearing, although I thought I spoke from a perspective of some experience, I got an answer that went roughly like this: You raised your children in a time and place so divorced from the present as to be as alien as the surface of Mars.

As to controlling my spouse, that stopped the day we were married. It was one of the first lessons I learned in matrimony. Feminism arrived early in our marriage and has remained a permanent member of our family. Not for me the hunter home from the hill, the sailor home from the sea. I was equal maybe, but hardly dominant. And clearly not in control.

So, I wondered, what was left

Well, so I was told, my own life.

Or what was left of it. Specifically, the advice I got was that I was free and able to do anything I wanted.

The emphasis, if I heard it right, was anything I wanted. Not anything I wanted others to do. I thought about that for a while, too. Well, I supposed, there were still some things over which I had control.

Well, sort of.

I could get up by myself in the morning--if I got up early enough--and if I ate by myself, I could avoid dietary advice: "You're surely not going to put butter on your toast ... "

I could slouch--but not for long--in front of the television set, watching the Weather Channel and the Today show.

I could even go for a walk if I wanted--but I couldn't not go for a walk.

As, for example, "You're not just going to sit there all morning. You need exercise."

There are a lot of things like that over which my control is limited.

So when it came right down to it, I didn't really have a lot of control over much of my life. In fact, I felt it slipping away from me.

But I also thought I had better make the most of it. Because just over the horizon I could see the time coming when I might not have even that, when control over my life would, like the setting sun, sink slowly into the sea at sunset and disappear.

I could even see the time when I might, if not in a wheelchair, at least be in a room which I only inhabited and over which I had completely lost control to "them."

Best not to ask who "they" were.

Whoever "they" were by the time I got to that time, I would do whatever "they" told me to do. Because then they certainly would be in control. And I would have to do whatever they told me to do.

Certainly not willingly, but still certainly.

So I am trying to heed the advice I got. I'm not trying to be in control of anyone except myself, and I'm trying to do that for as long as I can.

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