Our lives are based around two things: circumstance and decisions. Circumstance is everything you can’t control. This is your privilege or your lack thereof. This is the stuff that just happens to you. Were you in the right place at the right time? Circumstance. Then, the rest of your life is made up of decisions. This is everything you actively do. Did you work really hard or not hard enough? Did you take that risk or let it slip through your fingers? These are both decisions.
I realize just about everything that occurs to us or around us can be placed into one of these two categories. Where life takes us is a delicate cocktail of these two concepts, and any variation in any aspect of it would take us somewhere different than where we are.
Whether large or small, everything that happens to us matters. However, in order to be happy and feel fulfilled in our lives, we have to be able to distinguish between circumstances and decisions. The decisions we make are incredibly important, and we cannot pretend this is not the case. Yet life is incredibly frustrating in that a substantial amount of it is entirely out of our control. Enter circumstance. Although our lives are our lives, we cannot control circumstance. Our only control is how we respond to it. Enter decisions. In college, we are just learning how to function as people. Functioning, while it seems like the bare minimum, is quite a tall order. We minimize this as we shoot for the stars and do all we can to achieve our potential and change the world. While we shouldn’t stop shooting for the stars and changing the world, we should take a moment, every once in a while, to focus on this bare minimum.
Within each of these categories, we find past and future. Past circumstance and future circumstance, past decisions and future decisions. Of all of these, if we start the clock right now, we only have control over one of these. We can control our future decisions. That is it. This is quite a lot to take on. However, it is only a fraction of our lives. The rest have either already happened or are out of our control.
When the world seems to be crashing down around you and you feel out of control, remember you do have full control over some things. And when the world is crashing down around you and you feel weighed down by how much you have to concern yourself with, remember you truly only have control over future decisions. The rest, while it can still cause significant distress, is not in your realm. I realize you can’t just turn worry off, but you can release some.
So, as the semester comes to an end, and as your world (and the world in general, let’s be honest) may seem like it’s crashing down around you, remember your power. Your power is massive and awe-inspiring, but it does not include your past or your circumstance. The sooner we accept this, the sooner we can seize our potential and get to work on what we can control.
Taylor Cavaliere is a UF journalism and psychology junior. Her column appears on Mondays.
