the illusion of control

Like in Denmark the storm hit Helsingborg Thursday. In Denmark this year's storm (up on till now, because who knows what the rest of December might bring) was called by the charming name of Bodil, here in Sweden it somehow changed gender and name and became Sven. Maybe because that Thursday was Sven's name-day.

Anyway, whatever the name of the storm, it caused devastation, wreaked havoc, left chaos in it's wake, as storms have a tendency to do, the landscape was left touched, scarred, altered. The buildings along the coastline took a beating.

I walked along the beachfront of Helsingborg yesterday where huge hills of Seaweed had been gathered by trucks, cleaning up the "mess". Rocks had been thrown meters up from the wavebreakers unto pavement, broken it in places, the kallbadhus is closed for repairs, apparently a window in one of the saunas broke, the beachfront restaurants, especially vulnerable, looked like ruins where nature had long had it's way, done it's thing, changing, changing, changing.



And people were out there inspecting the effects of the storm, just like me, curious and this sense of righteous indignation in the voices of people I passed by. As though this was an annoyance, a temporary flaw in the nature of things, something faulty, an inconvenience. Still relatively minor, but then again, two weeks, three weeks without sauna, having to fix carports and garages again, changing windows, doors, cleaning up. Inconvenienced, yes, but hardly destroyed.




But as always in these situations, we tend to miss the point.
That these natural phenomena are a wake-up call. They point to the fact that we are not in control of nature. We have, especially in our western culture, made lifestyles where we live quite sheltered lives. Sheltered from the natural forces and powers that are so much bigger than us. We have created an illusion of control. Control dependant on that everything runs smoothly, according to plan. And most of the time they do. Most of the time we feel in control. Most of the time we are sheltered from the rain, the wind, the storms...and then sometimes when things fall apart, there is this eerie feeling that we can not control our life, nature. We have no idea when we are going to die. We don't know when our friends are going to die. Our family. We don't know, when the life that we have so carefully built for ourselves will fall apart, crumble, disintegrate. But we know, deep down, that it will ...

I always feel slightly elated, when things fall apart. There is this beautiful little story by Tove Jansson, which is called "Filifjonken som elskede katastrofer" (the filifjonk who loved catastrophes). In the story filifjonken is waiting for the catastrophe she deep down knows will happen, and she is intimidated and fearful, but when the catastrophe strikes, suddenly she discovers a reservoir of calm and joy. I think it's like that. If we can invite in the fact, that we cannot control life, invite in the catastrophes of our lives we will discover joy and a calm, that is the opposite of control. Relax, nothing is under control as one image that was spread on Facebook told us :-) May you all be at peace, nothing is under control ...