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The Mirage of Control

8 December 202513 November 2025

It’s strange how deeply we believe that life can be held together if only we try hard enough. We chase stability—saving money, nurturing relationships, building routines—as if somewhere there’s a version of life that will finally stop moving. But it never does. Things keep shifting. People change. Bodies age. Plans unravel. The world doesn’t sit still long enough for us to catch it.

When I read that the world is a mirage, it struck me how true that feels. Not because life is fake, but because it’s fleeting. Everything we call solid is, in truth, moving—slowly, quietly, dissolving into something else. The more we try to hold it, the faster it slips through our fingers. It’s like trying to grab smoke; the tighter you close your hand, the less of it you keep.

We spend so much of our lives fighting this falling apart. We call it “fixing things,” “planning ahead,” or “staying in control,” but underneath, it’s the same fear—that if we stop managing, everything will collapse. Yet even with all the managing, it still collapses. We still lose people, time, health, certainty. It’s exhausting to fight something that was never meant to be permanent.

Maybe the point isn’t to fix the world, but to live in it as it falls apart—to hold things gently, to let moments be what they are before they change into something else. Maybe peace comes when we stop expecting life to be solid. Because it never was. It was always made of air and light, passing through our hands no matter how hard we try to keep it.

And maybe that’s not tragedy at all. Maybe that’s beauty—the kind that only exists because it doesn’t last.

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