Prompts for Control Freaks

Virgo Season bonus edition!

When I moved to California I started seeing an astrologer. I still consult her sometimes, and love going to her office where she’ll pull up an array of indecipherable astral charts on an iPad after offering me a selection of herbal teabags that she organizes in a little wooden box. On my last visit she told me to hold onto my hat; that this year I should expect to feel like I’m desperately clinging onto an umbrella in a windstorm.

‘But don’t resist it!’ she said.

I could hear her cat meowing in the next room, which I tried to ignore. ‘White knuckle + umbrella = ok???,’ I wrote down in my notebook, and went on my way.

I’ve been thinking about control.

The impulse to shrink things down, to keep the world small enough to manage. To avoid the unknown because it might hurt…or maybe because there could be some new pleasure that destabilizes everything you thought you understood. William S. Burroughs, famous control freak, asked, “is Control controlled by its need to control?” In other words, control often loops back on itself, shaping everything except what it was meant to regulate.

There’s a counterpoint to this argument in the macrobiotic heath philosophy of George Ohsawa, who suggested that rigidity is antithetical to sustaining a system. Instead, he suggested, we are bettered by removing all obstacles that trap us in our “small selves” and actively creating the conditions where expansion is possible. “Refuse to let go and you are a person drowning; the more you struggle, the faster you sink,” he wrote.

So: white knuckle plus umbrella, minus abstract future pain, multiplied by the possibility of oversized pleasure, divided by a macro bowl and a copy of Naked Lunch. What am I talking about again? Oh, Virgo season! The best time of the year! When methodical madness and obsessive ritual just make perfect sense.

Amid this momentary, slowed-down segment of summer’s end, consider where you’re falling on that spectrum: what’s easy-breezy, what you’re clinging onto for dear life, and how ready you feel to move with whatever blows in next. It’s like surfing: to paddle out and stand up on the board starts first with deliberate action, then requires surrender. Don’t get swept away by the undertow, ok?

x
LP