Chapter 25: Releasing What Was Never Yours to Control

When Marguerite’s daughter told her she was leaving a steady job to start a company overseas, Marguerite said all the right things.

“That’s wonderful, Camille. I’m so proud of you.” She meant it. She also felt as though she had swallowed a handful of nails.

Camille was twenty-eight. She was clever and stubborn and had been planning the move for a year. Her business idea, a service connecting small farmers with restaurants, was a good one, as far as Marguerite could judge. It was also risky, and far away, in a country where Marguerite did not speak the language and could not easily visit.

In the weeks that followed, Marguerite became a person she did not recognize. She lay awake running through the ways it could fail. She went back, in her mind, to Camille’s childhood, searching for the moment when she might have raised her differently, more cautious, perhaps, or less encouraging. She wrote long emails of advice, with bullet points about contracts, savings, and insurance, and deleted them before sending. She drafted another, and a third. She followed Camille’s accounts online, checking for signs of trouble. She was exhausted by a worry that had nowhere to go.

“I just want to know she’ll be all right,” she told a friend. “Is that so much to ask?”

Her friend, who had been through a version of this with her own son, said gently: “It’s a lot to ask of the universe.”

What is ours, and what is not

Underneath much overthinking is a quiet confusion about responsibility. We feel that if we care about something enough, we must be able to control it. If we cannot, then perhaps we are not trying hard enough. And so we think harder, as if worrying were a form of steering.

Psychologists have long been interested in how people understand control. In the 1960s, Julian Rotter introduced the idea of locus of control, the degree to which people believe that outcomes are determined by their own actions or by external forces. Healthy functioning, in his view, involves an accurate sense of which is which. The trouble comes when we mistake the one for the other, when we assume responsibility for things that lie outside our reach, or when we give up on things that were within it.

The question is very old. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus opened his short handbook with a distinction between things that are up to us, such as our judgments, intentions, and actions, and things that are not, such as our reputation, other people’s choices, and the future. The famous prayer often attributed to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr asks for the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what can, and the wisdom to know the difference. The writer Stephen Covey gave the same idea a modern form with his image of two circles: a large circle of concern, containing everything that worries us, and a smaller circle of influence, containing what we can actually affect.

The wisdom is in the last part: knowing the difference. That is the skill we are practicing here.

Three zones

It can help to think of any concern as having three zones.

What I control. My own choices, words, and actions. How I prepare. How I speak. Whether I show up.

What I can influence, but not control. Other people’s decisions, to the extent that I can offer information, make a request, or set an example. I can say what I think. I cannot make anyone act on it.

What I cannot control. Other people’s ultimate choices. The future. The economy. The weather. How things turn out. What others think of me.

Overthinking tends to spend most of its energy in the third zone, and to neglect the first. Marguerite’s anxious hours were directed at things she could not affect: whether Camille’s venture would succeed, what the future held, whether Camille would be safe. Meanwhile, the first zone, her own conduct, went largely unexamined.

Acceptance is not approval

A common worry is that letting go means not caring, or condoning what is happening. It does not. Acceptance, in the psychological sense, means acknowledging reality as it is, without demanding that it be otherwise. You can accept that your daughter is leaving without endorsing every part of her plan. You can accept that something painful has happened and still wish it had not.

Nor does letting go mean pretending that it doesn’t hurt. There is often grief in it: for the future we imagined, for the version of events we wanted, for the protection we cannot give. This grief deserves to be felt rather than analyzed away. Often the loops we spin around uncontrollable things are, underneath, the grief we haven’t yet allowed.

And letting go is not passive. It is a way of redirecting energy to where it can do some good.

Try this: Control, influence, release

Choose a concern that has been circling. On a sheet of paper, draw three columns.

1. What I control. List your own actions: what you will say, what you will do, how you will prepare, how you will treat yourself.

1. What I can influence. List the things where your input might matter, even if it won’t decide the matter. Offering my honest view once. Sharing information. Staying in touch.

1. What I cannot control. Be honest. Whether she succeeds. What others do. The future.

1. Act on the first two. Choose one concrete action from each. Put a date on it.

1. Release the third. Write a sentence for each item: This is not mine to control. I can care about it without carrying it. Some people make a small ritual of it: writing the items on paper and tearing it up, or sitting for a moment and breathing out.

1. Write a “my part” statement. My part is to say what I think once, to offer help, and to trust her to run her life.

For Marguerite, the first column was long and quiet: tell her my concerns once, clearly; offer to review the contract; set up a monthly call; book a visit for the autumn; take care of my own sleep. The second included offering the name of a friend who’d lived abroad. The third was blunt: whether the company succeeds; whether Camille makes mistakes; whether she is ever in difficulty.

She wrote a single letter, not the bullet-pointed manifesto, but a short and honest one. It said that she was proud, that she was also afraid, that she had a few concerns she wanted to name once and then leave alone, and that she would be there, whatever happened. She sent it. She did not follow Camille’s accounts afterward. Instead, she put her energy into planning the visit.

It would be a lie to say the worry went away. It came and went, like weather. But it no longer had the run of the house. And when Camille called on the first Sunday of the month, as they had agreed, Marguerite found that she could listen to her daughter’s voice, and what it was saying, rather than to the sound of everything that might go wrong.

Letting go is repeated, not final. You will release the same concern many times. Each time you act on the first column, you give the worry somewhere useful to go. Grief is allowed to arrive. If the matter really is yours, such as the safety of someone who depends on you, this tool is for sorting responsibilities, not for abandoning them.

A THOUGHT TO CARRY

You can love something completely and still not be in charge of how it turns out.