Once a week or so I head over to the forums page of geocaching.com to see what people are talking about, join in a conversation or two, that sort of thing. Last week I responded to a geocacher who was expressing frustration that people weren’t doing his new cache “correctly,” and frankly, I had to laugh.

In fact, that very frustration is one of the themes in my book, Open Your Heart with Geocaching: you cannot control what others do. This particular geocacher has a challenge/response component to his cache — in other words, cachers need to answer a question in order to log the find. Some enterprising souls decided that they don’t want to answer the question, found the cache through alternate means, and logged it. The cache-hider, perplexed, asked others on the forum what he should do. Delete the “illegal” logs?

I feel for him, truly I do. As anyone who has read my book knows, I, too, am a bit of a control freak. I, too, have a challenge/response cache, though I’ve been fortunate in that folks doing it have been a fairly self-selected bunch and don’t seem to mind.

But the reality is that you can never control how others play the game. You can never tell them that this is “the” way to do it. For some people, that’s the challenge: outfox the cache-hider! As my spouse often says, “it will end in tears.”

It’s not a bad life-lesson. We’d probably all feel a lot less frustrated if we ever accepted that the only people whose actions and behaviors we can control are … ourselves. I cannot make other people behave the way I want them to (and, believe me, I’ve tried!), and that will surely end in tears, one way or another. What I can control is myself: how I behave, how I react and respond to others’ behavior.

Playing the game — whether geocaching or life — involves a lot of give-and-take. We can lament when others appear to do nothing but take … but perhaps we can balance that karmically, too, with an overabundance of giving!

Jeannette Cézanne
Open Your Heart with Geocaching