The Only Person You Can Control is Yourself

Prayers are not only those located in a “prayer book.” They are found whenever human beings reach out and use words to express their thoughts, their fears, their dreams. The Hebrew term “to pray”, lehitpallel, actually means to self-introspect/ self-assess. In English, the word for prayer has more obvious theological connotations, as it is based on the Latin precarius ‘obtained by entreaty’, something you get by making a plea to God. But whether we believe prayer is magic, and the object of our request is like Santa Claus, who can slide down the chimney of our lives and make it all better or, to the contrary, we understand that the power over our happiness lies within us, makes all of the difference, both in what and how we pray. 

In this post, we look at an offering by Rabindranath Tagore [India; 1861-1941], a Bengali poet, musician and painter who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. “The Grasp of your Hand is from his collection Fruit Gathering, first published in 1916.

The Grasp of Your Hand

Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers,
but to be fearless in facing them.

Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but
for the heart to conquer it.

Let me not crave in anxious fear to be saved,
but hope for the patience to win my freedom.

Grant me that I may not be a coward, feeling
Your mercy in my success alone; but let me find
the grasp of Your hand in my failure.

The piece starts out by ironically using fairly aggressive language in describing the act of staying humble. While implicitly praying to the One whose ‘hand’ is there to grab in times of fragility or crisis, the speaker employs some oddly macho terms, perhaps to hide his insecurity. He wishes to be “fearless” and not a “coward,” so that he might “conquer,” and achieve “success.” But the last line gives it all away, asking for the grasp of the Other’s hand in failure. Nowhere is God’s name mentioned. It could very well be a shout out to the divine, but it might also be to a partner or beloved. 

Tagore sets an agenda for prayer, for the things one should not pray for even more than those one should. There is no utility, he suggests, in asking for some kind of fairy-tale life, where nothing bad ever happens. Reality is never thus. To pray for shelter from danger, or the avoidance of pain, or to rely upon external salvation, someone to save you from the world’s messiness, is to ask for the sun not to rise or the rain not to fall. 

We do not control anything but our own reactions to the things that happen to us. 

All we can ask from the Listener is to help us be the best we can, by cultivating calm and resoluteness in the midst of whatever we face, and patience to understand that all things—all things—do and must pass: sadly, that which we love but also, if we can practice letting go of control, that which causes us anxiety and anguish. 

Some people today talk as if all relevant ideas were only invented in the last 50 years (or fifty days!), but current discussions about “being in the moment” and “staying mindful,” are concepts that Judaism and other faith traditions have been thinking through for millennia. A wonderful text in the Mishnah (2^nd century) lays bare the futility of much of what we obsess over: 

“One who cries over the past, behold this is a vain [futile] prayer. How so? If his wife was pregnant and he says, `May it be his will that my wife give birth to a male child,’ this is a vain prayer. If he is coming home from a journey and he hears a cry of distress in the town and says, `May it be his will that this not be among those of my house,’ this is a vain prayer.” Mishnah, Brachot, (9:3)

In other words, what’s done is done. Why does this text use two examples? Because one case is a presumably happy event, the other a potentially disastrous one. But in either situation, trying to influence what has already transpired is equally pointless. So much of our mental focus, every single hour of every single day, is expended on wishing that things that are already in the past were not so, or by ruminating and fixating over what is to come. By living either in the past or the future, we never actually get to the business of living in the here and now. And with our focus always somewhere else, we fail to pay attention to what makes our lives precious, which are the interactions we could be having each moment with the people and the ideas that matter. 

In 1198, Maimonides write the “Regimen of Health” and gave it to the Egyptian sultan Afdal Nur al-Din Ali, who reportedly suffered acute bouts of depression. Maimonides’ instructions, with little alteration of its 12^th century phrasing save for perhaps gender neutrality, could be part of any contemporary Buddhist style mindfulness training: 

“Whenever he thinks about something that distresses him, and worry, grief, or sadness crop up in him, it can be due only to one of two things: either he is thinking about a matter that has already taken place…or else he is thinking about matters he expects and whose advent he dreads…disaster he expects. Thinking about what has taken place and has happened is of no benefit at all…Thinking leading to depression about something that is expected to come to pass in the future ought also to be abandoned. That is because everything that a man expects is within the realm of possibility: it may take place or it may not take place.” [my emphasis]

Maimonides’ advice to the sultan should be a 4 x 6 card in our brains and our bulletin boards: worrying about the past and the future will only lead to anxiety and grief. We have no control over what has occurred or might occur. As Maimonides concludes, maybe stuff will happen and maybe it won’t. But the overall picture is one that is much bigger than us and of our abilities to exert influence. Of course, we exert efforts to make money and look after our health, improve our parenting acumen and relationship building, in an attempt to prevent negative consequences and promote happy outcomes. But, after all of our striving, we must still recognize the incredibly humbling limits of what we can control.  We do our best and then the question is whether we can be sanguine and content, come what may.

Even if you want to ask, “what’s so bad about musing about the future and remembering the past?” the elephant in the room, in all of this, is time. How much time do we have to waste about what is gone or is not yet and may never be? The 17^th century poet, Andrew Marvell, in a playfully comic attempt to seduce a woman who has been resisting his advances, advances this bit of carpe diem in “To His Coy Mistress: “Had we but world enough and time/This coyness, lady, were no crime….The grave’s a fine and private place/But none, I think, do there embrace.”

Right now, today, we can begin to change our mental and spiritual framework, and practice through moments of prayer, in small steps each day, the art of letting go of the fantasy of control. I am moved by what Tagore writes, but unlike the speaker in his prayer, I do not strive be “fearless” in facing danger, or to “conquer” my pain. That turns life into a war movie, where “victory” is measured by heroic reactions in the heat of battle. My own experience is that most of life is played out in much smaller but regular challenges – will I let my parent/child/boss irritate me today, like clockwork, in the exact ways they have a thousand times before? Do I always need to win an argument by spending massive amounts of emotional capital trying to persuade the other that “I am right”? Do I seem to fritter away lots of time worrying about how other people speak to me, or what they think of me? Do I scrutinize other people’s faces and body movements for signs of less than perfect approval? Will I flash my temper because things aren’t “going my way?”

If like me, your answer to some or all of the above is a yes more often that you would like, then let’s try to implement some of the lessons that Tagore’s piece inspires, by trying a daily (or weekly) prayer practice.

Your Turn:

Read through Tagore’s prayer. Focus on the theme of relinquishing control over outside events or misfortunes, including blaming others for what has happened in my life, and working on building up inner resources to meet the challenge of the day. To help concretize this process, please fill in the blanks of some or all of the questions below. Feel free to expand upon the space provided or write your thoughts on a separate sheet. Perhaps take a break, and then later on go over your answers and see what you have discovered. 

• I believe that the number one reason I am not as free as I would like to be in my life is because of ___________. 
• If it were not for ___________, I would have already done _______ in my life. Has blaming it/them ____________, paralysed my ability to move forward? 
• Given what I have just written above, I believe that the first small step I could make in order to gain more agency, and make some changes this year would be to ________ 

Contact me with your thoughts or questions on the Living Jewishly website at hello@livingjewishly.org. 

If you have a particular prayer from any faith or cultural tradition, or simply a piece of writing that feels “prayer like“ to you that you would like me to discuss in future posts, please send it along and I will read it carefully. Stay positive – change is underway. See you next time!