Day 2 of the PAINT party. Today, I am going to let you in on one aspect of my design process–the complete and total surrendering of control.

I am in recovery from control. I used to be super-controlling…seriously. I was a white-knuckler. I thought that the more stuff I could control, the greater the outcome would be. But life had other plans for me, thank goodness. Control is just a tool we use to treat our anxiety and existential dis-ease. When we don’t have answers to some of the big, profound questions in life, we control the outcome of all the small sh*t. And it becomes addictive. It makes us feel better and soothed. And, at the same time, it is completely exhausting because we run around like this: “I’m good enough, see? See how great I am at all this? Look at how I know what I’m doing. Look at how perfect I am…see?”  We begin to perfect everything in an attempt to show the outside world how completely awesome we are. But on the inside, we are just overwhelmingly uncomfortable with how imperfect we are–how messy, human, changeable, and scared we are–how terrified we are of everything and of life itself. So we control. But we aren’t in control anyway. It is all an illusion. We use control to self-medicate. If we think we are the one in control, then that places us higher than things like: nature, science, serendipity, god, synchronicity, poetry, divinity, wonder and magic. And that sucks. Because then we aren’t open to all of that wonderful stuff.    read more