I don’t know if I realized how tightly I was holding on, teeth clenched, to my imaginary control.

I suppose it is because we make things.

We can, in fact, make marks in the sand. We can fashion fluff into yarn, knit yarn into fabric, shape fabric into garments to clothe our soft and fragile bodies.

But this bounded control, the kind we’re accustomed to exerting, it tricks us. We make wild leaps of inference, into the sinking field of believing we can exert our will upon larger elements of our lives. Or the dangerous sense that we somehow ought to be able to.

While we can contribute, we can dance with the Zeitgeist and support the movement of culture, we’re still floating, buoyed up, swept along, and sometimes sucked under by currents much larger than our small selves.