The Paradox of Control

From struggle to surrender, they key to coherence and power...

Where The Sands Holds Water

October 1984. I was 23, somewhere between Niamey and Timbuktu, just after innocence and before initiation.

The Sahara was behind me, but its emptiness still echoed in my soul. I’d been hitchhiking for 3 months across Morocco, Algeria and Niger, and now Mali, sleeping rough, chasing the ghost trails of my childhood heroes: René Caillié, Mungo Park, Francis Burton. Men who vanished into the unknown, and returned with stories my world could not believe.

I was on my way to visit a friend in Gao but got stranded for days in Tillaberi. The roads had disappeared under the Niger's swollen waters. Cholera was sweeping through the region. Transport was uncertain. Food, even more so.

The desert had taught me not to expect much. Africa was teaching me to be ready for anything, and mostly to expect nothing at all.

Eventually, I boarded a slow ferry headed toward Timbuktu. Cabin tickets were too costly. I laid on the open deck, crowded with strangers and woven with smells, smoke, sweat, river damp. I spread my thin cloth among sleeping bodies, breathing through a cloth, trying to blend.

The heat was thick, sour, and constant. Damp clung to every surface, skin, cloth, metal railings, and mingled with the scents of boiled peanuts, frying fish and plantains, diesel fuel, urine, and my own acrid sweat.

I was the only white person on board. Everyone noticed and no one cared. I paid to be here, they would give anything to escape.

I tried to be invisible, folding myself into the crowd, but there’s no hiding when you are white and everything is Black.

At the bow, men squatted over the edge of the deck, shitting straight into the river. A few steps downstream, women filled buckets from the same water to brew the tea over open flames. The logic was striking and impossible to hold. The Niger didn’t care. It kept flowing, swollen with floodwaters, majestic and brown. Part lifeline, part grave.

The landscape was breathtaking, desert dunes rolling toward the horizon, golden under the setting sun. And yet, death sat openly among us. It traveled with us like a quiet companion. Poverty left its seal on everything, but there was dignity. People shared food. Mothers comforted babies. No one complained.

We were all in it together: the smell, the heat, the dust, the flow.
Africa doesn’t hide life’s edges.

That night, as the boat pushed gently against the current, a woman beside me went into labor. A soldier barked and cleared a patch of deck. I was kicked out with no reverence. I slid a few feet over, grateful to rest beside a man who seemed peacefully still. He made no sound as I settled next to him.

The river was quiet, swollen, glistening under the moon. Desert dunes flanked us on both sides, glowing like they had borrowed some sun to give back. The air was heavy with all possibilities, water and sand, life and illness, silence and blood.

By morning, the boat rooster had started singing.
A baby had been born, crying.
And the man beside me had died, silently.

It was the first time I witnessed a birth. And a death.
And they happened at once, like a message.

But the message was not simple. Not as black and white.
Birth and Death. Poverty and dignity. Desertification and floods. Beginning and end.
All braided together.

The COMANAV ship “Tombouctou”

---

The Illusion

Something in me shifted that night. I though I could manage, comfort, distance, identity, yet none had meaning on that deck.
In me something was dying too. And something else was being born.
Looking back, I’ve come to see that truth, in my experience, is often paradoxical.
That the most important secrets are hidden in plain sight.
And yet, it may take a lifetime to uncover the simplest answers.

“It is just right,” Goldilocks might say.

If the enigma were too easy, we’d be bored.
If it were too hard, we’d be disheartened, trapped in despair.

So here we are: it’s just easy enough to keep us going, just hard enough to keep us humble.
Perfect balance.

Yet in that delicate balance, we often reach for control.
We believe control will lead us to safety, success, self-worth, even mastery.
Yet what if that very attempt is what keeps us stuck?

Take my morning, for example.
When I wake up, so do the 50 trillion cells of my body.
(Okay, maybe they never slept, just humor me.)
What’s the first thing I do?
Convene a meeting? Assign tasks?
Supervise every cell’s objective for the day?

Of course not. If I had that kind of control, I’d be overwhelmed, and probably dead.
Instead, I trust. I surrender. The cells do their job. The heart beats.
The breath adjusts.
Harmony reigns.

And the same goes for life.
The world doesn’t respond well to control.
But it moves beautifully when we trust.
Attempting to dominate the intelligence of life is like micromanaging our biology.

Power doesn’t come from control but from surrender.
It is surrender that creates coherence.

© Philippe Lopez

---

Do You Believe in Fate?

“Do you believe in fate, Neo?” asks Morpheus.
“No” Neo replies, “I don’t like the idea that I am not in control of my life”.
The Matrix.

Most of us feel the same.
We don’t like the idea that we’re not in control.

But let’s be honest: we can’t really control our thoughts.
We can’t control our feelings either.
And when I think and feel: I am those thoughts and feelings. Full stop.
Only in deep states of samadhi, typically reached through years of dedicated practice, can one see beyond thoughts and feelings, and glimpse who they are without them.

But does that mean I can’t function unless I’m in samadhi?
Of course not.

Yet trying to control thoughts and feelings doesn’t work much better.
It only feeds the illusion of control.
And anyone who’s lived long enough knows how flimsy that illusion is.

Just as we trust the heart to beat, and the cells to regenerate,
we can relinquish control and begin to trust life.

When we do, we tap into something far greater,
an intelligence that is vast, alive, and effortless.

---

Holding Two Stories At Once

As humans, we’re engaged in this short, luminous dance between birth and death.

Every moment, something is ending.
And something new is beginning.

A breath dies, and another is born.
A wave crashes, another is forming.
Dusk here, is dawn somewhere else.

Every heartbreak, challenge, and wave of grief echoes a broken attachment.
We hold on to what was, and often fail to see what’s coming.
It’s like clinging to the exhale, refusing the next inhale.
We suffocate.

“If your eyes are full of tears because the sun is gone, you won’t see the stars,” said Tagore.

With every death, something is also being born.
But we rarely see both at once.

Mastery is holding both stories at once.
To honor what is dying, fully. Without bypass. Without rushing.
To honor what is being born, even before it is visible.

Rush toward the new, and we grasp.
Cling to the old, and we despair.
The magic is in the balance.

---

Feel Forward

There’s a stage in the process of transformation where what’s dying feels far more present than what’s being born. That’s just the truth of it.

The ending is obvious.
The beginning is still invisible.
And in that in-between, the old feels heavy and the new feels distant.

Control says: Let’s plan, strategize, figure it out…
But that wouldn’t be surrender, would it?

Instead, ask:
When the new adventure arrives, how do I want to feel?
Then, start generating that feeling now, through other means.

You want to feel free? Then breathe like someone who is free.
You want to feel purposeful? Then act today like your contribution already matters.
You want to feel loved? Then fall in love with everything that is, now.

By feeling forward, we make space for the future to arrive organically, without control, without force. It’s simple mechanics:
If I want to feel free, but I’m not generating that feeling now, I will grasp.
If I want to feel loved, but I’m not being love now, I will grasp.

And freedom, love, purpose…
None of these arise from grasping.

---

The Story We Tell Ourselves

At the risk of appearing single-focused,
I believe all changes happen when we chose a story over another.

So what story am I living in right now?
Am I in the story of what is dying? Holding on to sadness, depression, resistance…
Am I in the story of what is being born? Finding curiosity, presence, renewal…

And can I hold both stories equally?
Grieving what is leaving, without contracting?
Allowing what is coming, allowing the expansion?

Our stories are not just fantasies, they are engines of this world.

Change my story, and I begin to change my nervous system.
Change my nervous system and I can relax into the unknown.
Embrace the new that is being born.
Without trying to control the outcome.

My biology will change. My body will change. My reality will change.

---

The Architect Was Always You

I have never found an architect behind the curtain.
I am it.
I am the unfolding.
I am not separate from the world, I am the universe experiencing itself.
Moment by moment.
Control isolates me from it.
Surrender unifies me with it.

And when I let life tell me how it wants to be lived…
That’s when I am finally alive.

---

PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by—with the intention to help us shape better stories, both personally and collectively.

Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.