outWORD by Matte Downey

In the past week I have had a lot of my plans changed. I did not change them – dates got mixed up, people called with emergencies, someone forgot an appointment, scheduled meetings developed conflicts and had to be rescheduled, the talk I prepared ended up being delivered by someone else, people were unavailable – all these things did not happen the way I planned them. Some things were beyond my control – other things were presented to me and I decided to go with the flow, change direction slightly, and alter my plans to accommodate someone else. I did not find any of it particularly traumatic or bothersome, and that is a good thing. I am learning to let go of the need to control my world. At another point in my life I would have freaked out about things not going the way I thought they should. Whether you admit it or not - and some people say they don’t have a controlling bone in their body but I would beg to differ – we ALL have this urge to make things happen our way; some of u

We live in an odd culture. Sometimes I take a step back and look at the things we do and don't do and find acceptable and awkward and it seems so strange. I was talking to a friend yesterday and despite my prodding, she found it difficult to say anything nice about herself. Why? It just feels wrong to say something like, “I am a kind person.” It feels proud and slightly false because can one ever be truly kind? I have other friends who like to tease me (I am an easy mark for this, I will admit) and I know this joking and trading harmless insults and sparring banter is a sign of affection, but on the other hand, why can’t they just tell me, “I like you and value spending time with you?” Why is that so difficult to say? Why must we couch all our affections in these insulting words that we don’t mean and adopt faux modest behaviour that keeps us from acknowledging the truth about ourselves? I am a fairly straightforward person, which can get me in trouble sometimes, but if I like some

When I was young I believed that I could change the world. Why not? The world I knew was quite small, just a few square miles, really, and the people I knew and cared about were all within those few acres, and the issues I grappled with were usually resolved within a day or two, and if I encountered something really tough, I enlisted the help of my father and he settled the matter in no time. The older I got, however, and the more I travelled and the more people I met, and the more complex the situations I encountered became, I started to lose hope that I could in fact influence anyone or accomplish anything! My life seemed insignificant and small and of little value when you looked at the whole picture of human history and especially when you took into account that I would probably never get to meet many influential people and those that I did meet, in positions of power or not, were exercising their free will, just like me. But lately, I have begun to adapt the attitude of my childho