On Moving the «Center of Mass» of Control Outside Yourself

In 2023 I celebrated my birthday in northern India, not far from the city of Jaipur. Unfortunately, somewhere in the middle of the trip I came down with the symptoms of sinusitis, and just for the experiment of it, I decided to see a respected Ayurvedic doctor. In India, by the way, this is a deeply honored profession — the training takes at least five and a half years. What I found most curious was that across the entire two-hour appointment we never once touched on what I’d actually come in with. Instead, the conversation drifted, almost by accident, into philosophy — into a comparison of the Eastern and Western ways of seeing the world. That talk, where we wandered through gratitude, charity, awareness, intuition and our place in the world, became one of the most memorable of my life.

I’d like to share a few of the thoughts that came up that day.

How do we arrive at stress and anxiety?

Most of us grew up shaped by Western philosophy. From an early age we’re taught to see ourselves as the center of everything that happens and to be responsible for everything around us. At first this covers only a handful of “objects” — home, kindergarten, parents, friends. We learn to control ourselves and the people closest to us, and at first it even seems we’re managing it rather well. But with age the circle of responsibility widens: school, university, family, work… Over time the number of points demanding our attention and control multiplies many times over, while our actual ability to influence everything around us drifts toward zero. The failure to keep up with this rising level of control breeds a feeling of helplessness — and we begin to feel anxiety, stress, depression.

My companion shared a curious thought with me: “you need to move the ‘center of mass’ of control outside yourself.” What this means is that the center of events lies not in us but in the world — a world at times full of injustice and of billions of unpredictable factors we cannot act upon. Once we grasp this, we stop agonizing over every setback; we learn to do our work as well as we can and to accept the results of our efforts unconditionally, even when things don’t go smoothly — without self-torture, without self-blame. So much of it doesn’t depend on us. And the practice includes a daily expression of gratitude — to the world and to ourselves, for everything that has already happened and for everything we already have.

What’s remarkable is that Stoicism teaches us exactly the same thing: to divide everything that happens into what is within our control and what is not. Our thoughts, our reactions to events, our behavior and our actions — these are in our power. Agonizing over what we can’t influence makes no sense. Often we suffer more from our own worrying than from the events themselves.

As Michel de Montaigne put it so well: “My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.”

And the best cure for worry? — to be busy with your own work.

Here’s to inner harmony and calm for us all! 😎