Bumpy Landings: Letting Go of Control Without Letting Go of Care

It has been a bumpy landing into September.

Maybe it's the comedown from a long, expansive summer. Maybe it's the unspoken pressure of new beginnings and fresh starts that September brings. Either way, the descent this year came with turbulence: someone reversing into our car, our childcare arrangement changing with no warning, the washing machine breaking down with about a hundred loads still to get through.

Standard stuff. And also, apparently, exactly what I needed to be fully reminded of a lesson I am still learning.

I have been doing my best to co-pilot the plane. And still, at times, we have been knocked off course.

It got me thinking about the flow of life, and whether I am actually in it, or whether I've been somewhere just off to the side of it, gripping a set of controls that isn't actually connected to anything.

The old contract

The truth is, I spent a lot of my life essentially tapped out of the conversation with life. Not so much living it as trying to manage it into submission. If I could just get a grip on the outcome, then it would all be alright. Classic perfectionist streak, dressed up as competence and straight A's.

Control means safety. That is what some part of me still wants to believe.

Except control does not exist. Not really. Anything could happen, and everything is happening, all the time, in every direction. We can make a decent guess at the weather ahead. We cannot make it hold still.

No wonder it has taken years to loosen this grip. I have been slowly removing that internalised programme for about ten years now, and let us be honest, it has not completely left. It is still in there. I am just more aware of her now, the part of me with white knuckles on the wheel, and I can meet her with another, dare I say, wiser, part of me that knows better. Most days.

What the grip was really protecting

So why the tight grip, over things this small? A car. A washing machine. And then, not so small, a childcare arrangement in genuine flux, no easy fix, no answer yet, if I'm honest. When I let myself go one layer further than wanting the outcome to go smoothly, what I find is older and less tidy. It was never really about the logistics of the week. It was about a much older fear: that if I do not deliver, if I do not hold it all together, I will be found lacking. Cast aside. Not enough.

That is the real reason the wheel gets gripped so hard. Not outcomes. Worth.

Whole, whichever way today goes

Which is where the relief actually sits, if I let it. My worth isn't something that ever depended on the outcome. Not the washing machine, not the childcare, not whether the plane lands smoothly. It's the same thing I keep coming back to on the mat, worth was never in the depth of the backbend or the stillness of the balance. It doesn't move. It was never something I had to earn by holding it all together, and it was never something I could lose by dropping it. Whole, before any of this happened. Whole, in the middle of it. Whole, whichever way today goes.

Call and response

This isn't the same as throwing my hands up and deciding whatever happens, happens. That's just control's tired cousin, checking out instead of gripping on. It can often show up as spiritual bypassing, the trite "everything happens for a reason." What I'm learning is something more active than that, and harder in its own way. It's listening. Staying close enough to what's actually emerging, right now, to respond to it, rather than to the version of today I'd already scripted in my head. And if I've genuinely done what I could, brought my full attention and my full effort, then whatever the outcome is, I can be at peace with it. Not because I don't care. Because I was never actually in charge of the outcome to begin with. Only of how fully I show up for it.

Life stops being a thing to wrestle and starts being a thing to respond to. Call and response. A conversation I am actually in, rather than one I am trying to control the outcome of.

I don't imagine I am the only one navigating the gripping and unfolding of life at the moment. The illusion of stability and uncertainty in the world is being fully felt by many of us. Wherever your own turbulence has shown up this week or this year, a diagnosis, a deadline, a difficult conversation still ahead of you, maybe some of this is familiar. The white knuckles. The old belief that if you can just manage it well enough, you'll be safe, or good enough, or both.

I'm still up here, hands on the controls. Still doing my best to fly this thing well, whatever that ends up meaning today. So I invite you to drop into the sense of relief that comes when you give up the control and slip into enjoying the ride.

With so much love,

Pippa

P.S. If your own landing has felt bumpy lately, The Reset Series might be worth having close by: five short practices, twenty minutes each, made for you now. Nothing to get right, nothing to keep up. Just something to return to when the ground feels less steady than usual.