Focus on What You Can Control

“It’s not what happens, it’s how you deal with it that counts”, has been my mantra for years. You fixate on the problem when you focus on why something bad happened and how it affected you.??When you put energy on what to do to make things better, your creative mind gets to work and your emotional state immediately improves. As a human being, you have the luxury of choosing your response, even in the face of the worst atrocity.?

Yet, it’s a choice we often don’t exercise. The popular perception is that other people have the power to make us feel a certain way. If your boss ignores your contribution at a meeting, you feel slighted because of it. If your friend insists on answering texts while you’re in the middle of sharing a difficult experience, you feel hurt. Your instinct is to blame how you feel on his insensitivity. But neither your rude boss nor your friend caused your sense of rejection. Your story about how your boss or your friend?should?have behaved did that. It’s your thinking about an experience that causes your reaction to it. You can change what you think and that gives you the power to choose how to respond, rather than react.?

Joseph Oubelkas’s energy was startling and contagious from the very beginning of our interview. We’d had a tiring trip from the U.K. to Holland and I was flagging, but within moments I felt buoyed by his enthusiasm.?

Joseph lives life as if today is his last on the planet and he wants to squeeze every drop of goodness from it.?He was brought up in Raamsdonksveer, a small village in southern Holland. His childhood was idyllic, marred only by the divorce of his parents when he was eleven. He told me that from then on, he received double the number of presents. Best of all though is that his father remarried and gave him the siblings he’d always wanted in the form of three younger brothers whom he adores.?

He started his own IT Company in his early twenties and his work took him to Morocco, the land of his father. Joseph had been brought up bi-lingual and his client needed someone who could speak Dutch and French and travel from site to site.?

On 23 December 2004, Joseph was in Northeast Morocco. He arrived at one of his client’s sites in the early morning to find several uniformed customs officers with shotguns rounding up screaming civilians in the yard. He approached the gate and spoke to a customs officer, who ushered him into the yard and marched him over to one of two white transit vans parked there. The officer threw open a door of one of them to expose the contents. There were 8000 kilos of drugs stored in brown plastic packages stacked neatly inside the van. All Joseph could say was?“Wow, that’s a lot of drugs”.?

The police later confiscated Joseph’s passport and took him to the station for questioning. He tried to be helpful, to share everything he knew. The trouble was, he didn’t really know anything. He was asked to remove his shoelaces and his belt and was taken to a holding cell. The Commander told him that he found it strange that Joseph had so many stamps on his passport.?

Joseph had been told he’d be home in Holland for Christmas, but that was the first of many promises to be broken. He was moved from the holding cell to a Moroccan jail on Boxing Day and told that the judge would acquit him the following Monday and he could return home then.??

The hearing was conducted in Arabic. He couldn’t understand a single word. Only when he was taken back to his cell was he told that the case had been postponed for a further three weeks, but it was two months before he returned to court.?

“A?couple of months went by and all of a sudden, out of the blue, the verdict came. I was sentenced to ten years imprisonment. I heard them say it. I was standing there. I was saying, “Ten years? What’s going on? All the time people are telling me there’s nothing to worry about, ‘You’ll be heading home, don’t you worry,’ and now all of a sudden I’m going to jail for ten years?”?The world I knew was stripped away at that moment and I fell into a ravine of emotions. I was crying, shouting, kicking and punching the air. The feelings of frustration, madness and injustice were overwhelming.”?

The judge who sentenced him said Joseph had twenty-two entry visas and only seventeen exit visas on his passport. It therefore seemed that he had not gone through customs on every occasion he left Morocco. That was sufficient proof for the judge to determine that he was guilty of smuggling drugs. At no time was Joseph told of the charges against him or given the opportunity to speak in his defence.?

In fact, Joseph’s passport had eleven entry visas and ten exit visas, exactly the right amount, given he had not yet left Morocco to return home. Joseph’s mother called the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Justice in Holland begging them to step in and fight for Joseph’s freedom. Finally, after two months, a lawyer was assigned to Joseph’s case. At the appeal, a second judge looked at the passport and accepted the visa stamps had been incorrectly counted, but he refused to reduce the sentence. Joseph had served three months of his ten-year sentence and had nine years and nine months remaining.??

“They translated the verdict for me in prison, with all of the flaws removed and the last sentence saying, “But we still find Mr Oubelkas guilty and sentenced to ten years imprisonment.” I read that, and something happened in my mind. It became a turning point in my life, because somehow, I had to be there, and I felt all of these emotions again of frustration and anger and injustice and I wanted to break everything. But somehow, at 24 years old, I decided, “You know what, I have to be here. I don’t know why. I don’t know how. They can imprison my body, but my spirit will be as free as a bird. They won’t touch my spirit. It’s not going to happen.”?

Joseph laid his head down that night on a floor of mud, dust, urine and faeces, knowing that he would be spending ten years in hell for a crime he did not commit. The cell was crammed with people laying head to tail like sardines in a can. Twice a day, the prison officer came by with a large iron pan full of green or brown ‘sludge’ shouting ‘food, food, food’. Joseph gripped his plastic container, pushing it out through the bars, jostling with the other prisoners so the guard could ladle in the mixture, and grabbing a small piece of stale bread. There were no blankets or beds or pillows or buckets. A hole in the floor served as a latrine, which often didn’t flush and the stench was thick and overwhelming in the unbearable heat of the day. A board was placed over the latrine at night so that the inmates could lie across it to sleep.??

Joseph could have lost his spirit among the cockroaches and the rats, among the filth and the malnutrition. Instead, he chose to focus not on what was lacking or wrong but on what little he still valued and was within his control.?

“The first tiny step for me was to take care of my teeth. My mum had said in her letters “Please take care of yourself really consciously, because the day you don’t take care of yourself anymore is the day you become an animal.”?My mum sent me parcels every week with toothpaste and dental floss. So, every day, three times a day, I was in this little toilet with the filth and stench and I still took care of my teeth at that little tap, with my blessed bottle of water. It was a precious ‘ freedom awareness moment’ for me.”?

Joseph was relying on those self-care rituals still available to him to create a feeling of freedom and maintain his dignity while incarcerated. Joseph’s mother gave him another precious piece of advice.?

“She said, “The prison bars aren’t there if you look through them. Look at that sparrow and see how it moves, see how beautifully nature or God created those feathers. Focus on those little things. Be in the moment as much as you can. That is where freedom lies.”?

Joseph started learning Arabic phonetically from his fellow prisoners. He wanted to connect with them, to listen to the stories about how they came to be in prison. Like so many of the Thrivers, he knew how critical support and connection is to thriving in the face of adversity. His mother created a Christmas tree decoration hand-cut out of paper. It was intricate and beautiful and she made two hundred of them so that Joseph could hand them out to other prisoners.??

“I can still see the image of those Christmas cards hanging at the bars of the cells among the filth and grime, waving a little in the wind.”??

Joseph was able to thrive in the most inhumane and unjust conditions because he committed to taking control of his attitude. He practised this commitment daily. He made a life changing and ultimately a lifesaving choice. He made sure that he focussed on what he could control and took care of that, as the alternative would have meant losing his mind. The prisoners would wait in line for hours to purchase items at the prison shop. Joseph chose to see that as an opportunity to socialise while other inmates complained constantly about how long the process took.???

He taught English and worked as a translator in a prison housing six thousand people. He created beauty in a harsh environment by taking over a section of the prison grounds and planting it out as a garden. He stayed fit by sectioning off a dusty quadrant, where he created a workout regime for himself and fellow inmates. He even had a cat called Pipi.?

On Monday, 15 June 2009, four and a half years into his ten-year sentence, Joseph was told he would be released.??

“The District Attorney was standing there with a piece of paper in his hand. He told me, “Joseph, I have good news for you. This is the Order of Release.” I asked him what it meant. I still couldn’t really believe it. He told me, “It means you can go home.” Those four words, I will never forget, “You can go home,” as easy as that.”?

What is interesting, though, is his reaction to the news.?

“Of course, I wanted to go home but I also thought, “I have to leave all of these people behind and who’s going to take care of English class? Who’s going to take care of the prison garden? Who’s going to take care of Pipi?”??

Joseph illustrates the extraordinary power of choosing your response, whatever horrors you face. He was able to forge close connections, to appreciate nature, to create beauty, to learn new skills, and to make a difference to others. He accomplished all this despite being falsely imprisoned in an inhumane, filthy and degrading environment. He was able to focus his energy and attention on what he could control and on what he had. He established routines that made him remember he was worthy and ignored the hardships that could have crushed his spirit.?

That Joseph’s spirit has been invigorated by his experience has inspired me. If he can maintain courage and compassion in the face of such injustice, then I can handle more minor challenges.

Whatever challenges you encounter, however great or small, you can learn so much from Joseph. If you choose to focus on what you have, on what you can control you will overcome challenges more quickly, embrace change more readily and thrive more fully.??