Whose Life Do You Manage?

We can spend hours conjuring up ways to manage other people’s lives.

How they “should” dress. Behave. Work. Sing. Dance. Relate. Clean or don’t clean house. Dress. Drive. Raise their kids. Eat. (Feel free to fill in your own words here…)

I’m ready to give it all up.

We didn’t arrive on planet Earth to manage all of humanity. Only ourselves.

I don’t know about you, but I can keep myself radically occupied just trying to handle my own choices.

Life has taught me some things.

People’s instructions on how someone else should live life usually miss the mark.

Everyone gets to make their own choices, even if we think their choices are wrong. It is not our place to judge another – they have the right to experience and learn from their choices. To limit another’s options is to limit their learning experiences.

Equally true is that others don’t understand the whole picture of our life. We don’t have the skill, resources, or inclination to live it their way. Balance comes when we choose the boundaries on who and what takes place in our own life.

To get a handle on this, I need to honestly assess myself.

Tend my own garden instead of weeding my neighbor’s.

Pluck the plank from my own eye before I remove the speck from another’s eye.

Be the change I wish to see in the world.

It’s fascinating that when I work on myself, the circumstances around me seem to improve. When I get out of the way, other people sort things out themselves, in their own way, in their own time.

When we let go of living others’ lives, we have more time and energy for our own growth and pursuits.

I’m giving up being the general manager of the Universe. I have too many things I want to do with my own life.

How about you?