Epic Quest progress report: Today is day 22. Total words: 4,934.

We have everything in our control.

At least, that’s what we’ve all grown up believing.

We control the weather, or at least the weather we experience: we set the temperature to something comfortable and close our shelters to all but the worst of the wind and rain. When hail falls, we come out afterward and shake our heads at the damage to our homes and cars, then file our insurance claims and go about our lives.

We control our own cycles of day and night: efficient electric lighting and unbroken access to information and entertainment mean we can stay up as late into the night as we want, and only the demands of work or school or family dictate when we have to rise in the morning.

We control where we live: fast, reliable transportation and near-ubiquitous access to pretty much everybody means we can live outside the town where we work, or in the middle of what used to be a swamp, or on the side of a mountain if that’s where we want to be and we have the resources.

We can build almost anything we can imagine, almost anywhere. We can cook recipes with authentic ingredients from anywhere in the world. We carry access to the sum of human knowledge in our pockets.

Lately, we can even control our own truth, choosing what to listen to from the infinite messages bombarding us every day and what to ignore or deny.

But every once in a great while, the world reminds us how small the scope of the things we can really control is. Because while we have quite a lot of control over how we experience the world, we have very little over the world itself. Or over our fellow humans.

It’s tempting, at times like these, to seek to control the world around us, to lash out and demand that others do what seems like the right thing. Because it hurts, and we want to make it better, and if everybody would just do the right thing, we could all get through this the way we imagine. And it doesn’t work, because everybody else is scared and hurting too, and not one of them has the same mind or set of experiences we do, and they’re wishing we would just do the right thing as they imagine it and they don’t want to listen to somebody who can’t see such a simple truth.

So everybody is trying to control everybody else, and nobody is willing to be controlled.

So what is to be done?

We can keep on the way we are going: shout louder and louder and just don’t stop shouting, because somebody will have to listen eventually. It’s how we’re wired, and it just feels natural to most of us. Except that with all of us shouting all the time, none of us is listening.

Or we can just go about our lives, shut out as much of the shouting as we can, and just do the right thing as we understand it. That’s probably more productive than shouting, and it might allow us to reach more people. Because they are more likely to follow our good example than our shouted advice.

Or we can listen. Try to hear the truths people are trying to share with us, rather than shouting our truth at them. Then maybe we can figure out together what is to be done. Because what we all want is to feel like we’ve been heard.

And in the end, that’s the only thing we can control: our own choices.

Maybe we can let that be enough.