Control of our lives

ITHOUGHT I had total control of my life, where I went, who I talked to. Then coronavirus and lock down happened, and everything changed.

Now the government set a framework of actions that I was allowed to do and many more that I was not allowed to do. I still had control of my actions within that framework, but much less than I used to.

There are always rules that we follow, some of which are backed by legal force, others by our own beliefs.

So, our lives are governed by the rules we choose to follow voluntarily, whether backed by legal force or not.

Most people have followed the lockdown guidelines, which has meant they mostly achieved their purpose. How do we choose which of these rules to follow? There are many influences on our life choices.

How you were brought up will have a big influence on the choices you make in life. Everyone has experiences while they are growing up that informs how they think and the choices they make. Everybody has a choice how they deal with these experiences.

You can accept what you learned as a child and live your life that way, which often does not require any special effort because you are just acting as you have been taught.

Another option is to reject what you learned as a child. This then requires a lot more effort, because if you are going to reject what you have learnt, you have to decide what to replace it with.

Another option is to carefully consider the things you learnt as a child and decide what you want to keep and what you want to discard.

This is probably best, but it can be a difficult task, bringing up lots of old memories.

One very important aspect of this is forgiveness for what happened in the past. It is easy to hold resentment over things that happened in your childhood, which negatively affects relationships.