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What Is Mine to Do

What Is Mine to Do

 

 

یہ مضمون اردو میں پڑھیں

The Hardest Part in the Serenity Prayer

I brought the question to him one day because it had been troubling me for a long time. “There’s something about the Serenity Prayer I don’t fully understand,” I said. He looked up, interested. “What is it?”

“I think most people focus on the first two parts,” I replied. “The serenity to accept what cannot be changed and the courage to change what can be changed. But the part that seems most difficult to me is the last one: the wisdom to know the difference. How do we actually know? How do we decide whether something is within our control?”

He smiled. “That is probably the hardest part.” For a moment, he remained silent, then continued. “The difficulty is that we are not always objective when evaluating situations.”

“What do you mean?”

“Our emotional state shapes how we perceive our ability to influence things,” he said. “When we feel strong, confident, and empowered, we often overestimate our control. We think we can fix everything, change people, solve every problem, and overcome every obstacle. And when we feel weak, we do the opposite. We underestimate our ability and convince ourselves that nothing can be changed, even things that are actually within our reach.”

I laughed. “Sometimes we think we control everything, and other times we think we control nothing.”

“Exactly,” he said, leaning forward slightly. “Let’s start with something simple. There are certain things that are directly within your control.”

“Such as?”

“Your thoughts. Your responses. Your decisions. Your actions. Your words. Your effort.”

“That sounds obvious.”

“It sounds obvious,” he replied, “but most people spend surprisingly little time focusing on these things.” He paused. “Now let’s talk about something else. Other people.”

I smiled. “That’s where life gets complicated.”

He laughed. “Yes. That’s where confusion usually begins. People often assume they have more control over others than they actually do.” He paused, then offered an example. “Children. Parents often believe they control their children. But do they really?”

“At least while the children are young,” I said.

“Not exactly,” he replied. “What they control are actions. A child eats because the parent insists. Sleeps because the parent decides. Follows rules because consequences exist. But that is only control of behavior, not of thoughts.” He let that sentence sit for a moment. “Think about it. Even when your child was five years old, you could not control what he believed, what he felt, or what he thought. You could influence those things, but you could never directly control them.”

I sat with that quietly, because it was true. He went on. “As children grow older, this reality becomes more obvious. Suddenly they disagree. They make their own choices. They form their own opinions. And parents become frustrated, because it feels to them as though something has changed, as though the child who once listened without question has somehow slipped out of their hands.” He paused, choosing his words carefully. “But nothing has actually changed. The disagreement, the independence, the private opinions, all of it was there long before it became visible. A small child does not lack a will of his own. He only lacks the strength, the words, and the confidence to make that will known. What grows with age is not the child’s independence. It is only the ability to express what was always there. So, when a parent senses that something has shifted, they are usually right that something looks different. But the underlying truth has not changed at all. It has simply come into view, the way a shape becomes visible once the fog around it clears.” He let that settle for a moment before finishing his thought. “That is when parents discover something that was always true. They were influencing all along, not controlling.”

I thought about several relationships in my life. “Then much of our frustration comes from confusing influence with control.”

He nodded. “A great deal of it.” Then he said something that changed how I thought about responsibility. “Your real circle of control is quite small.”

“That sounds discouraging.”

“It only sounds discouraging because you believe control creates power.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“Not necessarily. You control yourself. Your thoughts, responses, and decisions. Everything else is influence.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s already a lot,” he said. “It will feel like a lot once you start using it.”

He drew an imaginary circle with his hand. “Most people spend their lives in the outer circle—the circle of concerns—what people think, what other people should do, what the economy should do, and what family members should do.”

I laughed. “That sounds familiar.”

“It sounds familiar because that’s where most of us live.” He drew a smaller circle inside the larger one. “But when you focus on what you actually control—your actions, your habits, your responses—something interesting happens. Your influence grows.”

That seemed backward to me. “If my circle of control is smaller, why would my influence be larger?”

He smiled. “People are influenced by character. Think about the people who have influenced you most. Were they constantly trying to control you?”

“No,” I said, and I thought immediately of several names.

“What made them influential, then?”

I thought for a moment. “Their integrity. Their consistency. Their example.”

“Exactly. The more responsibility you take for your conduct, the more credible you become, and credibility creates influence. The irony is that people who spend all their time trying to control others usually lose influence, while those who focus on controlling themselves often gain it.”

For a moment, neither of us spoke. Then I asked another question. “How do I know whether something belongs in my circle of control or my circle of influence?”

He smiled. “Ask yourself a simple question. Can I directly decide this? If the answer is yes, it belongs in your circle of control. If the answer is no, it belongs at best in your circle of influence.”

“That sounds simple.”

“It is simple.”

“Then why is it so difficult?”

He smiled again. “Because, emotionally, we don’t like the answer.” We both laughed. “Think about it,” he continued. “You want someone to appreciate you. Can you make them appreciate you directly?”

“No. I can only influence them.”

“You want your child to make wise choices. Can you make those choices for them?”

“No. I can only guide.”

“Exactly.” He grew thoughtful. “Much of our anxiety stems from trying to carry responsibilities that do not belong to us. We want certainty. We want guarantees. We want complete control over outcomes. We want people to respond exactly as we hope. But life doesn’t work that way.”

“No,” I said quietly. “It doesn’t.”

He nodded. “We are responsible for effort, not outcomes.” That line reminded me of so many spiritual teachings I had encountered over the years. “God never gave us control over everything,” he continued. “He gave us responsibility.” The distinction felt profound, and I sat with it for a while.

As our conversation ended, I found myself thinking again about the Serenity Prayer. For years, I had assumed that serenity and courage were the difficult parts. Now I understood why wisdom sits between them, because without it, we try to change what cannot be changed or surrender what should be changed. Perhaps wisdom begins when we stop asking how to control this situation and start asking instead what is mine to do here. That question quietly returns us to reality.

My thoughts are mine. My actions are mine. My responses are mine. My effort is mine. Other people are not. Outcomes are not. The future is not. Strangely, the clearer we see those boundaries, the lighter life becomes. Not because problems disappear, but because we stop carrying burdens that were never ours to begin with.

 

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Loose Ends

Loose Ends

 

 

 

 

یہ مضمون اردو میں پڑھیں

A mug sat on my desk that I had been meaning to deal with for two days. I finally gestured at it, half-embarrassed, and said, “It’s just a cup.”

He smiled, the kind of smile that told me he had heard that exact sentence in a hundred different forms before. Because it is rarely just a cup. It is usually something quieter and more familiar than that. I’ll reply later. I’ll organize it tomorrow. I’ll clean it afterward. I’ll deal with it when I have more time. And somehow, without any single dramatic decision, life quietly fills with unfinished things.

He had a word for these things that I liked better than any other I had tried. Not errands, because an errand implies you have to leave the house, go somewhere, complete some transaction out in the world—and most of what sits unfinished around us never asks that much of us. Not trivialities either, since that word suggests they don’t matter, and the whole point was that they do. He called them loose ends: small threads left dangling, none of them dramatic on their own, each one quietly refusing to let the moment close.

He told me a very ordinary story to explain what he meant. He had walked into his room one morning and noticed a coffee cup still sitting there from the day before. After a meeting the previous afternoon, he had rushed outside and simply left it behind, forgotten in the rush of the day. The next morning, he looked at it and had the familiar thought everyone has in that moment: I’ll do it later. But then another thought appeared right behind the first one. How long would this actually take? A minute? Two minutes, perhaps, or even less? So he picked it up, carried it to the kitchen, rinsed it, and came back to his room. Simple. Almost insignificant. And yet he used that tiny, unremarkable moment to explain something surprisingly profound about how we live.

“We postpone many things unnecessarily,” he said.

At first, it sounded obvious, even a little too simple to be worth dwelling on. But the more I reflected on it, the more I realized how much of life quietly collapses under the weight of small delays. Not dramatic failures. Small postponements, one after another. One unread email becomes twenty. One unwashed cup becomes a cluttered room. One delayed conversation becomes emotional distance. One postponed task becomes chronic stress. And strangely, the task itself is often not the heaviest part of the burden. The mental weight of carrying it around is.

That was the first thing I began noticing after our conversation. Unfinished things occupy psychological space in a way that has nothing to do with their actual size. Even when we are not consciously thinking about them, they sit quietly in the background of our minds, a kind of invisible noise we have simply learned to live with.

He explained that many small tasks should simply be done immediately, not because they are morally profound in themselves, but because delaying them often costs more mental energy than completing them ever would. That sentence changed how I saw procrastination entirely. Because procrastination, I realized, is not really about time. It is about emotional friction, about the small resistance we feel toward a task and the relief we imagine we’ll get from avoiding it.

I decided to test this idea myself. One afternoon, I noticed several tiny tasks accumulating around me almost without my noticing. A message I needed to send, a document to file, a shirt lying on a chair, a book left open on the table. Individually, none of them mattered much at all. But together, they created a strange feeling of heaviness in the room, even though the room itself wasn’t particularly chaotic. My mind was simply slightly unsettled, the way a low hum in the background can unsettle you without you quite knowing why.

So, I tried something different. Instead of planning when I would deal with them later, I simply handled them immediately, one by one–a minute here, thirty seconds there. Within ten minutes, everything was clear. What surprised me wasn’t the physical result, which was modest enough. It was the emotional effect. I felt lighter, in a way that seemed disproportionate to what I had actually done.

That is when I understood what he was really pointing toward. Small acts of order create psychological clarity that has little to do with the task’s size. We often imagine discipline as something dramatic: waking up at four in the morning, following perfect routines, maintaining extraordinary productivity day after day. But many times, discipline begins somewhere far less glamorous than that. It begins with the cup. With the message. With the small unfinished thing sitting right in front of you, waiting.

He explained that postponement easily becomes a habit, and habits rarely stay confined to one area of life. A person who regularly delays small things slowly trains their own mind toward avoidance. The brain begins associating discomfort–even the tiniest, most trivial discomfort–with the act of postponing, and eventually that pattern spreads into larger responsibilities as well.

I remembered something from my own student years as he said this. Whenever I delayed organizing my study materials, the actual studying became emotionally harder, and not because the subject itself was difficult or impossible. It was because disorder creates its own resistance. The mind quietly feels overwhelmed by accumulation, even accumulation that has nothing directly to do with the task at hand, and once that overwhelm begins, avoidance follows naturally behind it. That is why small unfinished things matter more than they appear to on the surface. Not because the objects themselves are important, but because the patterns they create are.

He wasn’t advocating for obsessive perfectionism, and that distinction mattered to him. This was not about becoming rigid or neurotic over every tiny detail of life. It was about reducing unnecessary delay wherever immediate action is genuinely possible. He suggested there is something psychologically powerful in simply telling yourself: if this takes one minute, I will do it now. That principle interrupts procrastination before it can expand into something larger.

I began applying it in surprisingly small ways: putting things back immediately, answering simple messages without unnecessary delay, washing dishes right after using them, filing papers before they had the chance to pile up. Tiny actions, each one almost too small to notice on its own. But together they changed the emotional atmosphere of my days in a way I hadn’t expected.

I noticed something else too. Immediate action creates its own momentum. Once the mind begins moving, larger tasks start to feel easier, almost as if they are being carried along by the same motion. But delay creates stagnation instead, and stagnation has a way of spreading quietly into everything around it.

Postponement also offers a hidden emotional comfort worth naming honestly. When we delay something, we temporarily escape the discomfort of doing it, and that escape can feel like real relief in the moment. But that relief is deceptive, because the task does not actually disappear. It remains psychologically present, waiting for us, and we end up paying for that borrowed comfort later, usually with interest.

He had pointed to this gently, without ever reaching for complicated language. Sometimes, what exhausts us is not the work itself. It is the constant mental negotiation that surrounds unfinished work–the small argument we have with ourselves every time we walk past the thing we haven’t done yet.

I once met someone who described feeling perpetually overwhelmed, as though their life were simply too much to manage. But when we looked closely together, many of the stressful things in their life turned out to be small, unresolved tasks that had quietly accumulated over time: bills left unattended, emails unanswered, conversations postponed, objects left unfinished around the house. Nothing catastrophic on its own. But together, these small things created a kind of continuous cognitive pressure that felt, from the inside, indistinguishable from a much larger crisis.

That is when I realized something important. Peace is often built through small completions rather than through dramatic transformations. Not through a single sweeping change to how we live, but through the quiet accumulation of small things finished rather than left hanging.

This also has a spiritual dimension, one that felt important even though he never made it sound heavy-handed. Attentiveness matters. Care matters, even when it is directed at something as small as a cup or a message. The way a person handles their small responsibilities shapes the inner self in ways that are easy to overlook. Someone who consistently honors small responsibilities is quietly training reliability, presence, discipline, and a kind of respect for reality itself–for the fact that things are actually there, actually waiting, actually asking to be dealt with. And perhaps that is why seemingly insignificant actions can shape character far more than we tend to realize. A life rarely falls apart all at once. It slowly drifts through repeated postponements, each one small enough to seem harmless. And it slowly regains its order the same way, through repeated small acts of responsibility that seem almost too modest to matter.

Now, whenever I catch myself thinking I’ll do it later, I pause and ask a different question instead: how long would this actually take right now? And surprisingly often, the honest answer is less than a minute. So, I do it. Not because the task itself is monumental, but because I no longer want my life to be quietly governed by avoidable delay.

Because sometimes the heaviest burdens in life are not the big problems we can point to and name. They are the hundreds of loose ends we keep carrying from one moment into the next, each one small enough to ignore, all of them together heavy enough to notice.

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When Your Thoughts Start Thinking for You

When Your Thoughts Start Thinking for You

 

 

 

یہ مضمون اردو میں پڑھیں

“My mind doesn’t stop,” I said to him. “One thought leads to another, then another, then another. Before I know it, I’m anxious, overwhelmed, and emotionally exhausted.”

He nodded as if he had heard some version of this countless times. “Because you are not thinking your thoughts,” he said quietly after some time. “Your thoughts are thinking you.”

That observation lingered in my mind. Not because I understood it immediately, but because it described something I had often experienced without being able to explain it. I had always assumed that thinking was something I did consciously. Thoughts appeared because I chose to think about something. Worries happened because there was something worth worrying about. But the more I reflected on his words, the more I realized that much of what I called “thinking” wasn’t deliberate at all. It was automatic. Almost like a machine that had been switched on and forgotten.

Seeing my expression, he asked, “Tell me what usually happens when you become anxious.”

I thought for a moment, and then said, “Usually there’s something small that starts it.”

“Like what?” He asked.

“A problem. A possibility. Something uncertain.”

“And then?”

“I start thinking about what might happen.”

He nodded. “And then?”

I laughed. “Then I think about what might happen if that happens.”

“And then?”

I shook my head and said, “I see where this is going.”

He smiled and said, “Go on anyway.”

I thought about the last time anxiety had gotten hold of me, and said, “I sent an important email and didn’t receive a reply. At first, I just wondered whether they had seen it. Then I started wondering if I had said something wrong. Then I imagined they were unhappy with me. Then I started replaying the email in my head. An hour later I was feeling stressed about a situation that I had essentially invented.”

He nodded. “That is how thought chains work.”

The phrase made sense immediately. One thought appears. Then another attaches itself to it. Then another. A possibility becomes a concern. The concern becomes a scenario. The scenario becomes a prediction. And before long, the body is responding as though the imagined future has already arrived.

He gave another example. “A person notices a mild symptom.”

I nodded and said, “I’ve done that.”

“Most people have,” he said. “At first there is only a sensation. Then the mind begins asking questions.” What if it’s serious? What if it gets worse? What if the doctor finds something? What if I can’t handle it? “The interesting thing,” he continued, “is that reality has not changed much during those few minutes. What has changed is the person’s relationship to their thoughts.”

Something about that observation stayed with me. The anxiety often wasn’t coming directly from reality. It was coming from the chain. The mind had moved three, four, or ten steps into an imagined future and the body had followed.

“That chain usually unfolds unconsciously,” he said. “Most people do not choose it. They simply follow it. Like someone being carried by a current.”

The image felt accurate. When a strong thought appeared, I rarely stopped to examine it. I simply went wherever it led. One link connected to another. Then another. Then another. And because I was inside the process, I didn’t realize a process was happening.

After a while, I asked something that had always confused me. “So what am I supposed to do? Stop thinking?”

He smiled. “No. You are supposed to become conscious of your thinking.”

The distinction was subtle, but it changed the entire conversation. The goal was not to eliminate thought. The goal was to stop being dragged by it. He explained that emotional disturbance often points to one of two things. Either an unhealthy mental pattern is operating beneath awareness, or thoughts have started moving in an unhelpful direction without being questioned. “In both cases,” he said, “awareness comes first.”

“You keep using that word,” I said. “Awareness. What does it actually look like?”

“It begins by watching your thoughts,” He replied.

At first, that sounded strange. How do you watch something that seems to happen inside you?

Sensing my confusion, he gave me an image. “Imagine you are standing at the gate of a city.”

I listened.

“People approach the gate all day long. You do not automatically let every stranger enter. You look. You pay attention. You decide.”

“And thoughts are the strangers?”

“Something like that.”

The more I considered the image, the more practical it became. Most of the time I treated thoughts as commands. A thought appeared and immediately became the center of attention. I never paused to ask whether it deserved that attention. He suggested a simple exercise. “Take two minutes and focus on one thing.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

I was slightly disappointed. It sounded too simple to matter.

Then he added, “Your mind will probably wander dozens of times.”

That made me laugh. Because I already knew he was right.

“And every time it wanders,” he said, “bring it back.”

“That’s the exercise?”

“That is the exercise.”

A few days later, I tried it. I sat quietly and focused on my breathing. Within seconds, I was thinking about work. Then a conversation from the previous day. Then something I needed to buy. Then a meeting scheduled for the following week. Then a completely unrelated memory from years earlier. The experience was surprisingly humbling. I had always assumed my attention was under my control. Now I wasn’t so sure.

When I told him about it, he nodded. “Good.”

“Good?” I asked. “I just discovered how poor my concentration is.”

“No,” he said. “You discovered something that was already true. The difference is that now you can see it.”

I smiled. That sounded much less discouraging.

“This is training,” he continued. “Not failure.”

The way he framed it reminded me of physical exercise. No one goes to a gym, struggles to lift a weight, and concludes that strength training doesn’t work. The struggle is the training. Perhaps attention worked the same way. After a pause, he said something else that stayed with me. “Your brain is a tool,” he said.

I nodded.

“Like your hands. Like your eyes. Like your legs.”

At first the comparison seemed obvious. Then the implications began unfolding. My hands do not decide what to pick up. My legs do not decide where to walk. Yet somehow I had accepted that my mind could pull me wherever it wanted.

He explained that people often surrender authority to their thoughts without realizing it. A thought appears. Then attention follows automatically. No examination. No evaluation. No conscious choice. Just obedience. “This is what must change,” he said.

“How?”

“By remembering that the thought is not the decision.”

I sat quietly.

He continued, “You can acknowledge a thought without following it.”

That idea felt oddly liberating. I thought about how often I became trapped in unnecessary mental loops. Sometimes I would sit down to work on something difficult, and suddenly my mind became incredibly busy. A concern I hadn’t thought about all day would suddenly demand attention. An unfinished conversation would replay itself. An imagined future problem would appear. The thoughts felt important in the moment, but looking back, many were simply distractions from the work in front of me.

When I mentioned this, he laughed. “Interesting timing, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Notice how many urgent thoughts appear precisely when meaningful work begins.”

I laughed too. Because I knew exactly what he meant. The pattern was almost embarrassing once I saw it. Whenever effort was required, my mind became an expert at offering alternative subjects to think about.

He was careful, however, not to make the mind sound like an enemy. “The brain naturally prefers familiar patterns,” he said. “It likes efficiency. It likes comfort. Left unattended, it will often repeat what it already knows.”

That felt more accurate than calling it lazy. The problem was not that the mind was evil. The problem was that it could continue operating on old habits long after those habits stopped serving us.

“That’s why attention matters,” he said. “Because attention determines which patterns grow stronger.”

Over the following weeks, I began noticing thought chains earlier. Not always. But more often than before. Sometimes anxiety would start building, and instead of immediately following it, I would pause. I would ask myself: What am I actually thinking right now? Where is this thought leading? Is it useful? Am I consciously choosing this line of thought, or am I simply drifting? Interestingly, the questions themselves often interrupted the spiral. Not because they solved the problem immediately. But because they brought awareness back into the process.

I also began noticing something else. The mind becomes stronger in whatever it practices. Practice distraction and distraction grows. Practice attention and attention grows. Practice worry and worry becomes easier. Practice awareness and awareness becomes easier. None of this turned me into a perfectly calm person. I still worried. I still got distracted. I still found myself caught in chains of thought from time to time. The difference was that I no longer felt completely helpless inside them. I had begun to see attention as a responsibility. And perhaps that was the deeper lesson hidden beneath our conversation.

At first, I thought we were talking about anxiety. But by the end, it seemed we were talking about something larger. Authority. Who is leading? My conscious self or my automatic patterns?

For years, I had assumed that emotional suffering began when anxiety appeared. Now I wondered whether it often began much earlier, at the moment I surrendered my attention without noticing. As I reflected on our conversation, one sentence kept returning to me. “You are not thinking your thoughts. Your thoughts are thinking you.” I understood it differently now. The problem was never that thoughts existed. Thoughts will always exist. The question is whether I consciously direct them, or unconsciously follow wherever they lead.

Because the mind is a remarkable servant. But it makes a dangerous master.

And perhaps emotional maturity begins the moment a person quietly realizes that attention is not something to surrender by default, but something to steward deliberately. The moment a person stops asking, “What am I thinking?” and begins asking, “Why am I following this thought at all?”

/by

The Patience of Influence

The Patience of Influence

 

 

 

 

یہ مضمون اردو میں پڑھیں

Finally, one day, I asked him, “If I have done everything I reasonably can, what do I do when nothing seems to change?”

He looked at me thoughtfully. “How do you know they haven’t?”

I smiled. “I think I would know.”

“Would you?”

His question caught me by surprise.

He continued: “When you speak to someone today, when do you expect the change to happen?”

I thought about it. “Now,” I admitted.

He smiled and said, “Most of us do.” Then he leaned back in his chair. “But human beings rarely change that way.”

I asked him what he meant.

“Think about your own life,” he said. “How many of your deepest convictions were formed the very first time you heard them?”

I searched my memory. Very few. Most of the ideas that had shaped my life had returned again and again over the years. Sometimes they appeared in conversations. Sometimes in books. Sometimes through painful experiences. Often I didn’t appreciate their significance until much later.

He seemed to read my thoughts. “Influence usually works quietly,” he said. “It settles before it grows.”

That explained something I had never understood. I had been treating every important conversation as though it were a final examination. If nothing changed immediately, I assumed the conversation had failed. Perhaps that was never a fair expectation.

He smiled as though remembering something. “Many years ago,” he said, “someone gave me advice that I completely ignored.”

“What happened?”

“I repeated the same mistake for years.”

“And then?”

“One day I found myself remembering his words almost exactly.”

“What had changed?”

“I had.”

The simplicity of the answer stayed with me.

The words had been waiting long before I was ready to receive them. Perhaps that is true more often than we realize. Sometimes we are planting thoughts in ground that has not yet been prepared. That does not mean the seed is wasted. It simply means it has not yet found its season.

He must have noticed the image forming in my mind. “Think of a farmer,” he said. “He prepares the soil. He plants the seed. He waters it. He protects it from weeds.” He looked at me. “Does he then stand over the field demanding that the seed grow before sunset?”

I laughed and said, “Of course not.”

“Why not?”

“Because growth doesn’t happen that way.”

He nodded. “Then why do we expect people to?”

I had never connected the two. A farmer works faithfully because he understands that growth follows its own rhythm. He cannot manufacture life. He can only create the conditions in which life may flourish.

Perhaps influence works the same way. We prepare the soil with kindness. We plant truth with sincerity. We water it with patience. We protect the relationship with respect. But the growth itself comes from a place beyond our control.

That realization transformed the way I looked at time. Every sincere conversation no longer had to produce an immediate result. Every act of kindness no longer had to receive an immediate response. No longer did every piece of advice have to be accepted before I could consider it worthwhile. Some seeds germinate quickly. Others remain hidden for years. Yet both are still seeds.

Before we left, he said something I doubt I will ever forget. “You are not called to manufacture change.” He paused, and then added, “You are called to remain faithful in your influence.”

As I walked home, I realized that hope looks different now. It is no longer the anxious hope that insists on immediate results. It is the quieter hope that trusts sincere effort is never wasted, even when its fruit remains invisible.

Now, whenever I find myself becoming impatient with someone I care about, I picture the farmer. He is not idle. He works diligently. But he also knows when to stop striving and simply wait. Perhaps that is what patient influence looks like. We prepare. We plant. We nurture. And then we entrust the growth to the One who alone can bring it forth.

There is great peace in becoming a faithful farmer of souls instead of trying to become their maker.

/by

The Boundary of Responsibility

The Boundary of Responsibility

 

 

 

 

یہ مضمون اردو میں پڑھیں

The conversation stayed with me long after we had parted. I understood, at least in principle, that my role was to influence rather than to control. There was relief in that realization. Yet another question kept returning to my mind. If I am not responsible for changing another person, then what am I responsible for? The next time we met, I asked him exactly that. “If their decisions are ultimately theirs,” I said, “then where does my responsibility end?”

He did not answer immediately. Instead, he asked, “When you speak to someone you care about, what do you believe your duty is?”

I began listing the obvious things. “To be honest.”

He nodded.

“To be kind.”

Another nod.

“To explain clearly.”

“Good.”

“To remain patient.”

Again he nodded. As I continued thinking, I realized something. Everything I had mentioned described my own actions. None of them described the other person’s response.

He seemed pleased that I had noticed. “Your responsibility,” he said quietly, “always lies within your own conduct.”

The simplicity of the statement concealed how easily I had forgotten it. “So whether they listen…”

“…is not yours.”

“Whether they agree…”

“…is not yours.”

“Whether they change…”

He smiled and said, “…is certainly not yours.”

I sat quietly, allowing the thought to settle. For years I had allowed my sense of responsibility to expand far beyond my own actions. Every time someone ignored good advice, I instinctively felt I had not explained it well enough. Every time they repeated the same mistake, I assumed I needed to become more persuasive. It never occurred to me that I had crossed a boundary.

He drew an imaginary line on the table with his finger. “On this side,” he said, “is everything entrusted to you.”

I waited.

“Your intention. Your sincerity. Your wisdom. Your words. Your patience. Your character.”

Then he moved his finger to the other side. “And here…,” He paused for a moment, and then added, “…begins another person’s freedom.”

The image stayed with me. It was such a simple boundary, yet I had crossed it countless times without realizing it.

He then shared something personal. “There was a time,” he said, “when I lost my temper with a close friend.”

That surprised me.

“I had spoken to him several times about a decision that was harming him. I explained my concerns carefully. I listened to his perspective. I prayed for him. Yet nothing changed.”

“What happened?”

“One day he repeated the same mistake, and I became angry.” He looked down for a moment before continuing. “I wasn’t angry because he had made another mistake.” He paused, and then said, “I was angry because I had quietly begun expecting that my words should produce change.”

I recognized the feeling immediately. Not the situation. The expectation. How many times had I done the same thing? I had mistaken sincere effort for guaranteed results. He looked at me and said something I have remembered ever since: “Your responsibility does not grow simply because another person’s resistance grows.”

That sentence exposed a habit I had never questioned. Whenever someone failed to respond, I assumed I had to do more. Explain again. Persuade again. Push a little harder. As though another person’s reluctance automatically increased my obligation.

But it doesn’t. My responsibility remains what it always was: to act with sincerity, wisdom and respect. Nothing less. But also nothing more.

“But isn’t that difficult?” I asked. “How do you care deeply without feeling responsible for the outcome?”

He smiled. “You keep caring.” I waited. I knew something more was coming. Then, he said, “You simply stop carrying what was never yours.”

There was an extraordinary freedom in that distinction. He wasn’t asking me to become detached. He wasn’t telling me to stop advising, encouraging, or supporting. He was asking me to stop measuring my faithfulness by another person’s response.

As I reflected on countless conversations from my own life, I realized how often I had evaluated myself by outcomes I could never control. If they listened, I felt successful. If they ignored me, I felt defeated. Both judgments rested on the same mistake. I had allowed someone else’s choices to become the measure of my own responsibility. Now the boundary seemed much clearer. My task is to speak truthfully. To listen carefully. To choose my words wisely. To remain respectful. To be patient. To pray. Beyond that, another person’s journey belongs to them.

As we finished our conversation, he left me with one final thought: “The clearer this boundary becomes,” he said, “the more peacefully you will be able to love people.”

I didn’t fully understand the sentence then. But I knew another question had begun to form. If my responsibility ends with sincere effort…

What happens when that effort seems to accomplish nothing?

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Your Role Is Influence, Not Control

Your Role Is Influence, Not Control

 

 

 

یہ مضمون اردو میں پڑھیں

I said it with a mixture of frustration and disappointment. “I’ve explained this so many times,” I told him. “I’ve tried different approaches. I’ve been patient. I’ve been firm. I’ve reasoned with them. I’ve reminded them. But nothing changes.”

He listened without interrupting.

“I honestly don’t know what else I’m supposed to do,” I said, after waiting for almost a minute.

He remained silent for a moment. It was as though he wanted the question to settle before responding. Then he asked quietly, “What is it that you’re trying to achieve?”

The question seemed too obvious. “I want them to change,” I replied.

He nodded, but instead of responding, he asked another question. “And do you think that is your responsibility?”

I looked at him, slightly puzzled. “What do you mean? If I care about someone, of course I want them to change.”

“I didn’t ask what you wanted,” he said gently. “I asked whether it is your responsibility.”

I wasn’t sure how to answer. Until that moment, I had never separated the two. Caring for someone and wanting them to change had always seemed inseparable. If someone I loved was making poor decisions, wasn’t it natural to feel responsible for helping them become different?

Perhaps he sensed my confusion. “Tell me,” he said, “have you ever changed simply because someone else wanted you to?”

I smiled sheepishly and said, “No.”

“What made you change?” He asked.

I thought for a while. “Usually…” I said slowly, “I changed when I became convinced that I needed to.”

He nodded again. “So the real decision was yours.”

“Yes.”

“And yet,” he continued, “you expect other people to change merely because you have explained something well.”

I laughed quietly. When he put it that way, it sounded surprisingly unreasonable.

He wasn’t suggesting that explanations don’t matter. Of course they do. Advice can illuminate something we have failed to notice. A sincere conversation can open a door that had remained closed. Sometimes another person’s words become the beginning of a profound change. But none of those things actually cause the change. At best, they invite it. That distinction had never been clear to me before.

He seemed to notice the thought forming in my mind. “You can present an idea,” he said. “You can explain it patiently. You can answer questions. You can even become an example of what you are trying to teach. But you cannot decide on another person’s behalf.”

For a while neither of us spoke. As I reflected on his words, something uncomfortable began to surface. The truth was that I wasn’t merely trying to help. I was trying to make sure they changed. Until that moment, I had never admitted that to myself. I had described my efforts as concern, sincerity, or care. And all of those were genuine. But hidden beneath them was another expectation, one I had never questioned. If I explained things clearly enough… If I found the right words… If I remained patient long enough… Surely they would change.

Looking back, I realized that most of my frustration had not come from their behavior. It had come from the gap between my expectation and reality.

He offered an example. “Imagine a father whose son is making poor choices. The father stays awake at night thinking, ‘Perhaps I haven’t explained it well enough. Maybe I need to speak more firmly. Maybe I need one more conversation.'” He paused for a while and then said, “Do you think the father’s desire is wrong?”

“No,” I replied immediately.

“Neither do I,” he said. “His love is real. His concern is real. But if he begins to believe that his son’s transformation depends entirely upon him, love quietly turns into something else.”

“Control?” I offered.

He smiled and said, “Yes.”

The word lingered in my mind. Control rarely announces itself. It often disguises itself as concern. We convince ourselves that we are simply trying to help, while quietly expecting another person to become who we think they should be. When they don’t, disappointment slowly becomes frustration, frustration becomes pressure, and pressure begins to damage the very relationship we were trying to protect.

I sat there thinking about conversations I had repeated over and over again. Each time, I believed I was offering guidance. But each unsuccessful attempt felt strangely personal, as though their decision reflected my own failure. Now I was beginning to understand why.

I had unconsciously taken responsibility for something that had never belonged to me.

He broke the silence. “You can influence people,” he said. “Sometimes deeply. Sometimes for a lifetime. But influence and control are not the same thing.”

I repeated the sentence quietly to myself. Influence… Not control. For the first time, I realized that I had spent years confusing the two. Perhaps that is why I had become so exhausted. Trying to influence someone requires sincerity, wisdom, and patience. Trying to control them requires carrying a burden no human being was ever meant to carry.

As we stood to leave, he said one final thing. “The moment you believe that another person’s change is your responsibility, you begin carrying a weight that does not belong to you.”

I walked away thinking about that. Maybe the deepest form of care is not found in trying to control another person’s journey, but in faithfully offering what we can, while respecting that the journey itself is still theirs.

Until that day, I had believed that caring meant making sure people changed. Now I was beginning to see that caring and controlling are not the same thing.

And perhaps wisdom begins when we finally learn the difference.

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Empathy Is Not Agreement

Empathy Is Not Agreement

 

 

 

یہ مضمون اردو میں پڑھیں

I asked him a question that had been bothering me for a long time: “If I listen to someone—really listen, let them speak, give them space to express their pain—won’t they assume I agree with them?”

“That’s a real risk,” he said. “And it becomes dangerous if you don’t understand the difference.”

“Between what?” I asked.

“Between empathy and agreement.”

At first, that sounded simple. But the more he spoke, the more I realized how often we confuse the two, and how much damage that confusion causes in families, friendships, and workplaces.

He explained it slowly, as if unwrapping something fragile. “When someone is in pain,” he said, “they are not presenting a balanced argument. They are presenting a perception.”

That distinction stopped me. A person may feel wronged. Betrayed. Overlooked. But what they are expressing is not necessarily reality; it is their interpretation of reality.

“And empathy,” he continued, “is not about validating the interpretation. It is about acknowledging the feeling.”

That was subtle but profound.

It means saying, in essence: “Given how you are seeing this situation, it makes sense that you feel this way.” Not: “You are right in how you are seeing this situation.”

He gave an example that made it unforgettable.

“Imagine a young woman who has just been passed over for a promotion,” he said. “She comes to you and says, ‘It’s because my manager doesn’t like me. It’s discrimination.’”

Two things are happening at once: One: She feels humiliated, angry, and hurt. Two: She has interpreted the situation as deliberate unfairness.

Empathy addresses the first—not the second. You can say: “I can see how deeply this hurts. Anyone in your position would feel crushed.” But that does not mean you are confirming: “Yes, your manager is definitely biased.”

This is where most people slip. They think that if they don’t affirm the person’s narrative, they are being cold. And if they do affirm it, they are agreeing with them. But true empathy is neither cold nor agreement. It is being there for someone.

I raised another concern. “But what if they misunderstand?” I asked. “What if my silence or listening makes them think I agree?”

He nodded. “That can happen. And it will happen.”

There was no attempt to soften the truth.

“People can misinterpret empathy as agreement,” he said. “But that does not mean you abandon empathy.”

That was hard to accept. We all want immediate clarity. Immediate correction. We want to say, “Just so you know, I don’t agree with you.”

But he pointed toward something more patient. “Don’t treat a conversation as the final interaction,” he said.

That changed everything. If I believe this moment is my only chance to correct someone, I will rush. I will argue. I will push. And most likely, I will damage the relationship. But if I understand that conversations unfold over time, that clarity can emerge gradually, then I can afford to listen first. To understand first. To build trust first. And only then, at the right moment, gently introduce perspective.

He warned me about something more subtle: “Debate,” he said, “is often poison in close relationships.”

That felt counterintuitive. Isn’t truth important? Isn’t clarity important?

“Yes,” he said, “but not at the cost of connection.”

He told me a story: “A friend once came to me, furious about a family member who had wronged him. His version of events was full of holes. I could clearly see his role in the conflict. And my first instinct was to point it out.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“He stopped talking to me for three months. Not because I was wrong—but because he came to me for comfort, and I gave him a lecture.”

That story landed hard. When a person is in emotional distress, they are not ready to be corrected. If you try to “fix” their thinking immediately, they will resist. Not because your point is wrong, but because their state is not receptive. And once the interaction turns into a debate, the goal shifts. It is no longer about understanding. It becomes about winning. And when winning enters, relationships bleed.

Then he said something even deeper: “You cannot reform people,” he said. “You can only influence them.”

That sentence carried weight. Because so much of our frustration comes from assuming responsibility for outcomes that are not ours.

We think: I have explained this so many times; why don’t they change? I have shown them the right way; why don’t they follow? And when they don’t, we feel helpless. Irritated. Even betrayed.

But he reframed it. “That frustration,” he said, “comes from thinking you are responsible for changing them.”

I felt exposed. Because that was exactly what I had been doing, quietly, subtly, sometimes even unconsciously. Trying to fix people.

He shared a personal moment. “I lost my temper once with a close family member,” he said. “I had given him advice repeatedly. Kindly. Patiently. Clearly. And he kept making the same mistake.”

His voice softened as he said, “I shouted at him. And later, sitting alone, I realized I wasn’t angry at him. I was angry at myself for believing I could control his growth.”

That was the turning point. When he shifted from ‘I must change him’ to ‘I must contribute positively’, the frustration began to dissolve. Not because the other person changed. But because he stopped carrying a weight that was never his to carry.

He explained it in very clear terms. “My role is to present my understanding with sincerity, kindness, and preparation. After that, what the other person does, that is their journey.”

That does not mean indifference. It means clarity. You still care. You still listen. You still offer perspective. But you do not carry the burden of the outcome.

I thought about more difficult situations. People who move from person to person, seeking validation, distorting facts, even turning others against you. “What about that?” I asked. “What if they twist things and create real harm?”

He didn’t deny the complexity. “Yes,” he said. “That can happen. And it is painful.” Then he told me about someone he once knew. A colleague who spread rumors, played victim, and quietly poisoned relationships. “For months, I wanted to defend myself publicly. To correct every lie. To expose him.”

“What stopped you?”

“I realized that defending myself aggressively would only feed the drama. So, I stayed honest. I stayed consistent. I refused to play his game.”

“And what happened?”

“It took over a year. But eventually, people saw the pattern. Not because I argued, because I didn’t. The truth surfaced on its own.”

He looked at me. “You still operate within your domain. You remain honest. You remain clear. You remain consistent. And you trust that over time, truth has a way of rising. Not always immediately, not always comfortably, but eventually.”

What stayed with me the most was the quiet simplicity of the principle. Empathy is not agreement. Influence is not control. Responsibility is not outcome. If I can hold these distinctions clearly, so much confusion dissolves. I can listen without feeling compromised. I can care without feeling responsible for change. I can speak without turning every conversation into a battleground.

He brought it back to something deeper.

“You are accountable,” he said, “for your intention, your effort, your conduct. Not for another person’s transformation.” He paused and then added, “That belongs to them. And ultimately, to God.” There was no heaviness in his voice. Only peace.

I walked away with a different understanding of what it means to “be there” for someone. It is not about agreeing with them. It is not about correcting them immediately. It is not about fixing them. It is about creating a space where they are heard, without losing your own clarity. And then, gently, patiently, over time… offering something better than agreement.

Offering understanding. And perhaps, if they are ready, a way forward.

/by

You Don’t Fix Emotions Directly

You Don’t Fix Emotions Directly

 

 

 

یہ مضمون اردو میں پڑھیں

I asked him something that had been bothering me for a while, “If thoughts affect emotions, and emotions affect thoughts… then can we work directly on emotions to fix our thinking? Can we calm emotions first, and let thoughts follow?”

He paused, not dismissing the question, but refining it. “What you call working on emotions,” he said, “is almost always cognitive work.”

That was not the answer I expected. I had assumed emotions were something immediate, something we feel and therefore something we should address at the level of feeling. But he was pointing somewhere deeper, somewhere less obvious.

He continued, “Emotions are not independent. They are outcomes.”

That word—outcomes—shifted the entire frame. He explained that what we experience as an emotion is actually the result of how we have perceived something. And that perception is not neutral. It is shaped by our thoughts, our interpretations, our past patterns, what he called our “construction.”

In other words, before an emotion appears, something has already happened inside. A meaning has been assigned. A judgment has been made. A pattern has been activated. And the emotion follows.

He gave a simple example.

Imagine you are walking into a dimly lit room and you see something coiled on the floor. Instantly, your body reacts—fear, tension, alertness. Your heart rate rises. In that moment, the emotion feels real. Immediate. Unquestionable. But what produced it? Not the object itself. The thought: “This is a snake.”

Now imagine the light turns on. You see clearly that it’s just a coiled wire. What happens to the fear? It begins to dissolve. Not because you worked on the fear, or told yourself to “calm down,” but because the perception and the accompanying thought changed.

That is the nature of emotions. They follow perception. This is why, he explained, working on emotions directly is often ineffective. You can try to suppress them, distract yourself, or temporarily soothe them, but unless the underlying thought or construction changes, the emotion will return.

So the real question is not: How do I stop feeling this? The real question is: What am I thinking that is producing this feeling? And sometimes, the answer is not obvious. He pointed out that many of our emotional reactions are driven not by conscious thoughts, but by unconscious patterns. These are patterns we have built over time through experiences, assumptions, and repeated interpretations. You may not consciously think, “People always disrespect me.” But if that pattern exists within you, even subtly, then a small comment from someone can trigger a strong emotional reaction. The emotion feels disproportionate. But the pattern explains it. This is why awareness becomes the first step.

He said, “When you ask yourself, ‘Why am I feeling this way?’ the answer is usually in your thoughts or your mental patterns.” And that requires reflection. Not reacting. Not suppressing. But observing.

Another example he gave stayed with me. He said, “Instead of trying to fix the immediate problem, bring your vision to life.”

At first, I didn’t fully understand.

Then he explained. When we are overwhelmed, we become consumed by the immediate situation: the argument, the setback, the failure. Our thoughts narrow. Our emotions intensify. But if, in that moment, we shift our thinking to a larger vision: What kind of person do I want to be? What is my long-term direction? something changes inside. The situation does not disappear. But its emotional weight begins to shift. Because now, the meaning has changed. Instead of “This is unbearable,” the thought becomes: “This is part of a larger journey.” And with that shift, the emotion softens. Again, not because we worked on the emotion. But because we changed the thought.

He also mentioned practices like meditation. I had always thought of meditation as a way to “calm emotions.” But he reframed it. “Even there,” he said, “what you are doing is controlling or pausing thoughts.” You are stepping back from the constant stream of thinking. You are creating space. And in that space, emotions begin to settle. But the mechanism is still cognitive. It is still about thoughts. That is why, he said, the most effective way to regulate emotions is to develop awareness of your thoughts and to gradually bring them under your influence. Not complete control, not instantly, but gradually.

This is not easy work. Because thoughts are fast. Patterns are deep. And emotions are convincing. When you feel something strongly, it feels true. It feels justified. It feels like reality. But often, it is not reality. It is an interpretation. And interpretations can be questioned.

I remember trying this myself in a small, everyday situation. Someone close to me said something that felt dismissive. Instantly, I felt irritation rising. My mind began building a narrative: They don’t respect me. They always do this. But this time, I paused. I asked myself: What exactly am I thinking right now? And I saw it. Not a fact. A pattern. I consciously replaced it with another possibility: Maybe they are distracted. Maybe they didn’t mean it that way. The emotion didn’t disappear instantly. But it softened. It lost its sharp edge. And more importantly, I didn’t react in a way I would later regret.

That small shift taught me something powerful. You don’t need to win over your emotions. You need to understand the thoughts behind them. And once you begin to see that, a different kind of control emerges. It is not control over what appears. But control over what you follow. Over time, as your constructions change, your emotional world changes with them. The storms become less frequent. The reactions become less intense. The recovery becomes quicker. Not because life becomes easier. But because your perception becomes clearer.

In the end, what he was telling me was simple, but not easy. You don’t fix emotions directly. You refine the way you see. And when you see differently, you begin to feel differently.

And when you feel differently, you begin to live differently.

/by

The Inner Work of Forgiveness

The Inner Work of Forgiveness

 

 

 

یہ مضمون اردو میں پڑھیں

I asked him a question that had been sitting uneasily inside me for a long time. The Qur’an tells us to forgive others, “Do you not wish that God should forgive you?” I understand the verse. I believe in it. But when someone hurts you, disrespects you, or damages your dignity, forgiveness does not come naturally. So, I asked him plainly: What does this actually look like in real life? How does one change the inner construction that makes forgiveness possible?

He paused, as he often does, and then said, “The first thing is to stop treating forgiveness as a single, flat concept.”

He could see the confusion on my face.

He explained that what we casually call forgiveness actually includes different inner responses that must be clearly distinguished. Confusing them is what creates emotional turmoil. “There is,” he said, “a difference between overlooking a mistake and fully forgiving someone.”

Overlooking, he explained, is often the first and most necessary step. It means choosing not to condemn, not to keep rehearsing the other person’s fault in your mind, not to keep building a case against them internally. Sometimes a person does not even realize they are wrong. Sometimes they sincerely believe that they are justified. In such cases, demanding remorse is unrealistic. “In those situations,” he said, “your responsibility is not to fix them. Your responsibility is to protect your own moral standard.” Overlooking does not mean approving. It means deciding not to descend to their level. I will not react with retaliation, bitterness, or inner contempt. It is a conscious choice to remain gentle without becoming naïve.

Then he moved to the second layer. “True forgiveness,” he said, “belongs to a different situation altogether.”

This applies when the other person recognizes their mistake, feels remorse, and comes forward to seek forgiveness. At that point, forgiveness is not partial. It is not conditional. It is not ‘I forgive you, but I will keep this on record.’ It is a clean release. He said something that struck deeply. “When someone asks forgiveness sincerely, they are doing exactly what you do when you stand before God.”

When I ask God for forgiveness, I do not hope for a half-erasure. I hope to be washed clean. I hope the burden is lifted, not merely reduced. And if that is the mercy I seek for myself, how can I justify offering a lesser version to others?

That question stayed with me.

He clarified something else that I had been carrying incorrectly. “Forgiveness does not cancel accountability,” he said. If someone knowingly commits wrong, they will answer for it before God, and sometimes in this world as well. Forgiving them does not mean denying justice or pretending harm did not occur. It means refusing to harbor hatred, vengeance, or a sense of moral superiority in your heart.

Then he brought up the Qur’anic context that gives this command its emotional weight. He reminded me of the verse in Surah An-Nur revealed after a deeply painful incident: the false allegations against Aisha (ra). The damage was not abstract; it was personal, social, and humiliating. Some of the people involved were not strangers. They were relatives. They were beneficiaries of kindness. Abu Bakr, who had been financially supporting one such relative, felt understandably wounded. His instinct was human: Why should I continue helping someone who harmed my family’s honor? It was then that the Qur’an asked a question that cuts straight through moral defensiveness: Do you not wish that God should forgive you?

The instruction was not naïve. It did not deny the pain. It redirected the heart. “Forgiveness here,” he explained, “was not weakness. It was moral elevation.”

What struck me was how the inner posture needed to be separated from external consequence. Abu Bakr was not told to deny wrongdoing. He was asked to rise above it and to keep his own soul aligned with mercy.

He then said something that quietly shifted how I see relationships. “Never deal with people according to their standards,” he said. “Deal with them according to yours.”

That sentence stuck with me. If I lower my standard every time someone else behaves poorly, then my morality becomes reactive. But if I hold my standard steady, overlooking where ignorance exists, forgiving where remorse appears, I remain anchored.

He warned me about something subtle but dangerous. “When you focus obsessively on the other person’s behavior, you start wanting control. And control is not available to you. That’s where frustration is born.”

I recognized myself immediately. The anger, the irritability, and the inner arguments were not coming from the act itself. They were coming from my insistence on a particular outcome: They must understand. They must change. They must behave differently. But that insistence was never my responsibility to begin with.

“My task,” he said gently, “is not to force reform. My task is to respond in the way that brings me closer to God.”

That reframed forgiveness not as a favor to the other person, but as fidelity to my own test. Overlooking becomes a way of refusing to poison my inner world. Forgiveness becomes a way of aligning my heart with the mercy I hope to receive.

By the end of the conversation, I realized that forgiveness is not a dramatic act. It is quiet inner labor. It is choosing—again and again—not to let someone else’s mistake decide who I become. And perhaps that is why the Qur’an asks the question the way it does. Do you not wish to be forgiven?

Because, in the end, forgiveness is not about them. It is about the kind of heart I am carrying forward.

/by

Why Thinking More Isn’t Helping You

Why Thinking More Isn’t Helping You

 

 

 

یہ مضمون اردو میں پڑھیں

It usually begins with a piece of information. A diagnosis. A news update. A rumor. A possibility. Nothing has happened yet—but suddenly, everything is happening inside the mind. The heart tightens. Thoughts start racing. And before I realize it, I am no longer responding to reality — I am responding to imagined futures.

I once shared this with him, and he smiled gently and said something that stayed with me. He said, “The problem is not that worry appears. The problem is when worry becomes your manager.”

That single sentence changed how I began to look at anxiety. There is a difference between being concerned and being consumed. If a loved one falls ill, concern is natural. If financial uncertainty appears, caution is healthy. If danger is possible, alertness is wise. But when concern crosses into mental occupation, when every conversation, every thought, every scenario becomes about the same fear, then something shifts. I am no longer responding. I am surrendering control.

I remember him saying quietly, “Concern belongs to wisdom. Obsession belongs to fear.” And fear is not cured by more thinking. One of the most liberating ideas I learned was to consciously separate life into two domains: One is my domain — what I can influence or control. The other is God’s domain — what lies beyond my control. Most emotional suffering does not come from pain itself, but from insisting on personally managing God’s domain.

For example, if a loved one is diagnosed with an illness.

My domain:

  • Finding competent doctors
  • Understanding treatment options
  • Being emotionally present
  • Supporting practically
  • Praying sincerely

God’s domain:

  • Outcomes
  • Recovery timelines
  • Life and death
  • Hidden wisdoms

When I cross into God’s domain mentally, emotionally, obsessively — I do not become safer.

I only become more anxious.

I remember him saying simply, “He handles His domain better than you ever could. So why exhaust yourself trying?” We often believe that talking more will reduce anxiety. But the content of what we talk about matters more than the quantity.

If I sit with people who only share:

  • How much someone suffered
  • Worst-case scenarios
  • Horror stories
  • Emotional dramatization

My nervous system absorbs that.

But if I choose conversations that focus on:

  • What can be done
  • Who can help
  • What improves outcomes
  • How people recovered
  • How to support wisely

My emotions begin to stabilize.

Same topic — different emotional outcomes — based purely on how I engage with it.

Worry thrives in narratives of helplessness. Stability grows in narratives of agency. There is a subtle psychological trick that worry plays. It tells me, “If I think enough, imagine enough, prepare for every outcome — I will be safer.”

But in reality, predicting pain does not prevent pain. Imagining loss does not protect from loss. Obsession does not produce control.

It only produces fatigue.

I remember him saying, “The mind starts confusing prediction with preparation. They are not the same.” Preparation belongs to action. Prediction belongs to anxiety. He once shared a simple childhood memory: On vaccination days, all the siblings would wake up anxious. Some tried to delay it. Some hid. Some cried. But he decided, “I will go first.”

Why?

Because “It is going to happen anyway. So why suffer twice — once in fear and once in reality?”

That moment quietly taught me that the inevitable pain should not be preceded by unnecessary suffering. Life will carry its share of difficulty. But worry makes me live it twice.

When a disturbing thought appears:

  • “What if it gets worse?”
  • “What if this fails?”
  • “What if I lose them?”

I pause now and ask myself: Is this my domain or God’s?

If it is mine, I act. If it is His, I release and repeat inwardly, “This is not my domain.” Not angrily. Not dismissively. But calmly. And I gently redirect, “What can I do right now?”

That single shift brings the mind back from chaos into agency.

Many people say, “I try not to think about it — but it comes again.”

Of course it does. The mind does not obey suppression. It obeys redirection. I cannot stop a river by blocking it. But I can change the channel.

Instead of fighting thoughts, I now:

  • Change their direction
  • Change their topic
  • Change their function

From fear to responsibility. From imagination to action. From paralysis to movement.

I remember a powerful realization he once shared. He said, “Life does not become peaceful when uncertainty disappears. Life becomes peaceful when I stop demanding certainty.” Because uncertainty is not a flaw in life. It is its structure. Faith is not about knowing what will happen. It is about knowing how to live regardless of what happens.

And that is where emotional maturity begins.

So, when worry takes over, the real question is not, “How do I remove worry completely?” The real question is, “Am I allowing worry to replace responsibility, faith, and clarity?”

Now I know that worry is not defeated by denial. It is defeated by clear boundaries between control and surrender. Disciplined attention. Faith-based realism. Purposeful action. Emotional literacy. And above all, by choosing to live in my domain, while trusting God in His. Because peace does not come from controlling life. Peace comes from knowing what belongs to me and what does not.

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