When you’re present, you don’t have control, and you don’t care. When you’re connected to your power, you don’t need control. … What matters is that you understand that being open is powerful.*
Katherine Morgan Schafler

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.**
Viktor Frankl

The fourth elemental truth^ states
You are not in control,
And yet this does not mean that you are not
powerful;
Learning for life,
The endless openness to more,
Without and within, is about
learning to be powerful –
Openness provides choice and
choice is powerful:
Education is personal or it is nothing.^^

Surely we ought to know our minds?,
Doesn’t openness suggest weakness?

We learn to be our own person,
Our true person, and using the
whole of life rather than some smaller part
to make this so:
A creative person.
initiating, enacting.
Using their lifetime to find
their original face,
to awaken their own voice,
beyond all learning, habit, thought.
When the human community finally knows itself,
it will discover that it lives at the centre.
People will be artists in their life and labour.*^

*Katherine Morgan Schafler’s The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control;
**Ben Hardy’s Be Your Future Self Now;
^Richard Rohr’s Adam’s Return;
^^Ken Robinson’s Out of Our Minds;
*^M. C. Richards’ Centering; I have replaced Mary Richards’ use of the masculine pronoun to highlight this is for everyone.