I watched a show on Netflix about a haunting someone experienced while at college (I still have a paranormal kick, it’s a guilty pleasure).  This person was an athlete on track to go to the Olympics, a steady student, disciplined, and stuck to the straight and narrow in all things so to say he was used to order is a bit of an understatement.  During the interviews, his father made a comment to the effect that the sense of order that comes from self-discipline gives a sense of safety. All of the structure we build in our lives including our routines gives us a sense of accomplishment and safety because we know what’s coming.  We know what to expect and we know how to handle it.  Regardless of this being in reference to a paranormal experience, that quote stood out.  We create routine for a sense of safety.  Routines developed over time for myriad of reasons—a time to plant and harvest the appropriate things, time to find safety, time to find work, a way to accommodate work and education, and even the systems we have in place around finances, education, healthcare, politics, etc.  All those systems exist to establish control and order.  Then we develop our individual systems to give us that sense of control in our own lives and without it, we get a little wonky.

From a mental health perspective, I go back and forth on the relevance of systems because I can see it going either way.  They’re either highly useful or they quickly become destructive.  Systems outside of ourselves tend to benefit the system itself while the systems we create can be highly beneficial.  But in either scenario (internal or external systems) we do it because we feel safe.  When we have a sense of order we feel like we’re in control and that makes us feel safe.  We may not even realize that safety is what we’ve been seeking—some of us like to know the answers because we like to know things without realizing the underlying implication that we are in control of things that happen outside of us.  The thing about unexpected experiences is that they show us what we DO have control over: our emotions and thoughts.  We don’t have to react to everything immediately.  We can take a step back, take a beat and realize how temporary our feelings are and make a decision about what we actually want to do versus what we think we have to do.  And if we really think about it, THAT is actually how we create safety. We demonstrate understanding and thought in the actions we take.  Sure, we are all human and we all have those moments where we legitimately have to act right then and there or where our emotions do get the best of us—but we don’t operate like that on a daily basis.

We establish our routines when we have a goal in mind and we know the steps we need to take to get there.  The level of discipline that follows can be an indicator of how far we would get on that journey toward the goal.  The sense of safety we feel isn’t necessarily from control, it’s from learning that we are capable of handling ourselves in any situation.  So this story in particular was interesting because it took place while in college—a time when we transition to adulthood and learn how to handle ourselves, we learn how to solve our own problems, learn what we like and don’t like, learn what it means to take responsibility for ourselves.  If we can establish discipline over our emotions in those scenarios, then we can do it anywhere.  When unexpected things come up, we learn to adapt the routine or change it as appropriate and sometimes our lives go in directions we didn’t anticipate.  We fall short of the goal.  But in most cases, if we really look back and think about it, we always ended up exactly where we needed to regardless.  So discipline has a time and a place as does routine—but we must remember that the only discipline that really matters is the discipline we have over ourselves and how we answer the call of what we are meant to do, how we handle setbacks, how we pivot, and how we approach the next goals.  Safety comes from knowing how to handle ourselves and following through.  That’s how we can handle anything that comes our way.