You can make yourself eat peas, but can you make yourself like them?

I was reminded the other day of how often we expect ourselves or others to be or feel something that’s not actually under our control. And one of the ways this happens is confusing our ability to control our actions with our helplessness in the moment to control our feelings. Whether it’s about peas, a house, or a person, because we can control our actions, and because our feelings can vary from time to time, we mistakenly think that how we feel about something in any given moment is our responsibility and should be under our control.

Say I like working out. But one day I wake up and I don’t feel like doing it. The tendency of the mind is to make life more complicated by not liking the fact that I’m not liking. I had a good workout yesterday. I generally like it. So I should like it today. Something’s wrong. The mind starts making up stuff–meanings. Oh, this means I’m this or that, I’m lazy, I guess I’m just not as into it as I thought…

Letting it be, acknowledging that in this moment, this or that happens to be what I feel, does not mean I don’t go work out. That’s a separate issue, or at least it can be. And deciding whether or not to work out will actually be less encumbered by letting the feeling be whatever it is moment to moment.

With working out, the whole process — waking up, wanting or not wanting to do it, reacting to that fact, and deciding to go do it or not –may not be a big deal. It may take only seconds and I may have learned tricks of sliding through it unconscious and seemingly unscathed. If I put on my running clothes before I get my first cup of coffee… 

But when I wake up one morning and hate my job, or my marriage or my life, the same mechanism is probably at work and the consequences of not being conscious or equanimous with what you have control over and what you don’t are a much bigger deal. If we miss the simple, tiny truths of what we feel moment to moment either by ignoring them, or by judging them and thinking they should be something else, it’s harder to know the deeper truths, the more profound desires about work and love and life.

With peas or working out or anything else, our past experience will tend to some balance of liking or not liking. That balance is effected, however slightly, by each additional experience. The balance can thus change over time, either by happenstance or deliberately. But confronted with a plate of peas or a workout in any given moment, I cannot command my reaction, my liking. I may not like my reaction. But it’s what’s happening. It may be frivolous or it may be profound, but it’s my life manifesting itself, and I would do well to pay attention.