When I was a young child, maybe six years old, someone told me that if you find an eyelash on your cheek, you should pick it up, blow it away, and make a wish. I had lots of wishes, lots of ideas about the way I wanted things to be, and so I proactively began pulling eyelashes to make my wishes. I not only wanted the control of making wishes, but I also wanted to make those wishes as frequently as I desired, rather than waiting until a random eyelash fell on my cheek.

As you might expect, some of those wishes came true and some didn’t, and while I’d like to say that my sacrifice of eyelashes had something to do with it, it’s more likely that the only causally-related outcome from my wish-making was that now I have very thin eyelashes. This idea of making wishes, whether we’re six years old or adults, has more to do with wanting to control reality than any specific need we might have. Trying to control reality, however, is a losing game; reality simply is what it is. What we can control is our response to reality.

My mantra as of late is a line from the poem called “The Cure for It All” by Julie Fehrenbacher:

Breathe until you stop needing anything to be different.

When I’m tempted to jump in and wrestle reality to the ground, I stop and breathe deeply until I no longer view reality as an adversary to be overcome or wished away. I may not have eyelashes to spare anymore, but I always can count on a deep breath to remind me that I can trust myself to take the next right step.