Dear Daughter,
I have found to my greatest disappointment that if there is a lesson you must learn, there is no getting away from it, no matter how hard you try. If in your youth you skip the misfortune that teaches you not to trust people carelessly, that lesson revamps itself to find you in your older years. One of the things I learnt from failed classes, failed relationships, and failed experiments is that you can do everything “right” and still get the wrong outcomes and you may do everything “wrong” and still get the right outcomes.
Truth is, the concept of right and wrong outside the confines of morality is very subjective. For there is no one size fits all pair of shoes that tells you if your life is going the right or wrong way. So, what do you do? – Don’t try to control everything. There is a certain level of discipline that is required of you to get through this life. A certain level of planning that you need to do in order to live life in the present but still be hopeful in the future. I don’t know what that minimum looks like but everyone has their threshold. Dear Daughter, find yours. In my peculiar case, I have found that I like to plan, in fact, planning helps me stay focused but my own way of not trying to control everything is being able to explore an alternative route in the event that one of the steps in my plan falls apart completely. One way to look at such things is that there is a lesson that you ought to learn at that moment. The reason people try to control everything is that they take themselves too seriously, over-emphasizing their importance in this world. It is in this desire to control everything that they fail to make their relationships and goals come to fruition. Being a control freak is a way of telling the world that you are the only one who can be right, and no one likes an obnoxious know it all. Being a control freak limits your ability to learn, because in you there is no willingness to imagine that another way other than yours could be right.
