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There’s an old saying, which, when I first heard it, I mentally objected and pushed the thought aside. The saying is, “Let go, or be dragged.”

The Buddhist idea that it is our attachments which causes our suffering makes it a likely origin. I couldn’t accept it because, like everyone, I am a child of my culture. Our culture teaches us from birth that we are valued according to our achievements.

We are molded by culture to believe we must continually do more, be more, or we’re not achieving as we should. We’re human doings instead of human beings, utterly attached to the idea of constant striving.

Many years ago I had a boss who told me, even though my sales record was the best in the division, I would not be getting the raise I’d expected. I gave him a quizzical look and he said, “I believe in rewarding people according to their ability, not according to their achievements.” According to him, I should be doing even better so I didn’t deserve a raise.

He was riding in my car at the time so, after a minute’s consideration of his brilliant management style, I made a U-turn, went back to the airport where I’d picked him up and invited him, rather curtly, to remove himself from the car and go back from whence he came. Needless to say, I left that company shortly thereafter.

Even though I rejected his thinking almost 50 years ago, I realize I still often operate as if he were correct. I still tend to have attitudes that have never served me well but I must pay psychological allegiance to them, relentlessly striving to achieve this or that in a futile quest for greater happiness in life.

I still continue to behave as if personal contentment in life could be mine if I can just manage to achieve some of the things which have eluded me.

One advantage of getting to a more advanced age is slowly coming to accept the reality that we do not, we can not, control life. Life is in constant flux, it changes non-stop. When we’re younger we think we can, if we try hard enough, alter life to suit ourselves. If we’re lucky enough to reach an advanced age we hopefully realize that’s impossible.

Reaching such a conclusion gives us two choices. We can either be bitter that we didn’t get what we wanted out of life or we can accept the reality and be at peace with it. In short, we can “let go or be dragged.”

So often, we think if we could just get someone else to change their behavior life would get better. That is contradicted by our inability to change our own even when we know we really should. How we expect to change someone else when we can’t change ourselves is a mystery. Life really is as good as our acceptance of it, not as good as we think we can make it.