How Trying to Control Your Life Makes It Worse

Many of us live our lives wanting predictability.

A steady rhythm we can count on that we can control, and situations that occur won't surprise us too much.

When I was in acupuncture school and in an apprenticeship, my mentors introduced us to a physicist named Hans-Peter Dürr who spent decades studying why that wanting predictability frame of reference might be working against us.

Dürr wasn't a fringe figure. He worked closely with Werner Heisenberg, ran the Max Planck Institute for Physics for years, spent his career at the center of quantum physics. He became fascinated by something simple-a pendulum, and what happens when you add complexity to it.

An ordinary pendulum is entirely predictable. Tap it, and you know exactly where it will be a moment from now, and the moment after that.

But add a second joint, then a third, and that same small tap goes into motion and becomes what physicists call deterministic chaos. It's still following physical laws, but the movement becomes wildly unpredictable.

Dürr said that living systems look far more like a chaotic, multi-jointed pendulum than the predictable one. Life isn't a swing of steady, controllable orchestration.

Life is dynamic, unstable, constantly shifting in ways that can't be fully predicted or locked down. He believed this instability wasn't a malfunction to correct.

It was the actual source of emergence, creativity, and life itself.

I've given this more thought lately in my work. A memory of my mentors saying when someone speaks of safety or predictability in their life, to remind them that we're on a mud ball flying through space.

How safe or predictable is that?

The illusion of predictability is everywhere. Are we losing living in the mystery and beauty of the unknown?

Chinese medicine has understood the body as an unpredictable, interconnected system for thousands of years, long before the West had language for systems thinking. Internal and external interconnected. One symptom pointing toward a larger pattern. Everyday choices rippling outward into every thing and every one.

But even within a system that understands interconnection, there's a trap. I was taught that once you've identified the pattern, it's tempting to want to close the loop. Diagnosis given. Protocol assigned. Problem solved. That instinct, even inside sophisticated systems thinking, is still trying to force a chaotic pendulum back into a simple one. It's like trying to make a toddler hold still.

I don't think that's actually possible (especially the toddler). And, the attempt is often where suffering lives.

A person isn't a pattern that resolves once it's correctly named. The pattern that was true in week one might have already shifted by week eight. If I've stopped looking because I already have my answer, I'll miss what's actually happening now.

I was trained throughout my years to be an observer, bring new eyes and curiosity to each moment, to each person every time you see them.

This takes discipline, but this is the work: to find pattern and not lock it into place. Because being in relationship with something that, by its true nature is dynamic, it’s going to keep changing.

One treatment, one coaching session, one qigong movement transforms you down to your cellular level.

And yes, a lot of the time, it's slower, less satisfying than if you want a clean fix and a closed file. But small noticeable changes are the way to stay honest to what's actually happening instead of what fits neatly into a framework.

Where in your life have you been trying to force something dynamic back into something predictable, and what would it look like to work with the instability instead of against it?

This is the foundation of everything I teach inside the Wisdom Within Method, whether the entry point is acupuncture, Zhineng Qigong, Hun Yuan Qi Therapy, or coaching.

The work isn't controlling the chaos. It's learning to move with what's already moving (and the movement could be dancing :)

Book a Wellness Insight Call by clicking the button above if you're ready to stop forcing your life into a shape that's no longer for you.