We say, blithely, ‘I surrender!’
And oh how we want that to be true.
Because…we think that if we give up…surrender…that then we will get the result we wanted all along. Finally! The partner, the job, the money, the enlightenment, the Side Crow Pose, the IG followers. It’s magical thinking.
Tell me that isn’t how you’ve fooled yourself in the past. Like somehow surrender releases the magic of prayers answered at last…only when we have stopped efforting to make it happen.
I say…I surrender…..and I know I’m lying. Don’t you?
I still want control….need control….hunger for the ‘right’ kind of control over my circumstances, even though if I have learned nothing else from the past four years and seven months, I have certainly come to realize that I have basically no control over what might happen.
Ok! Not entirely true.
What I do have ‘control’ over is my reactions….once I am past the biological, physiological responses that are autonomic, reflexive. I might be perfectly capable of seeing what is happening, even as I’m pissing myself in fight, flight or freeze responses and that is control..sort of.
Nonetheless…I still persist in some fantasy about how things will shake out for me.
And…I understand more about surrender.
It sounds so……so….final….like…’No take backsies!’.
And it sticks.
Yet…what does it mean? Surrender?
I give up my expectations?
I give up agency over my own life?
I agree to whatever fate the victor…whom or whatever that might be…has in store for me.
I lay down my amor, my illusions, my will.
Thy will…not mine…..
Ooops…Sorry! Not going biblical on you….but you get the idea.
Giving into the nature of things.
And somewhere in there…finding moments….glimpses of peace in my being.
Doesn’t mean I have to ‘like’ it on a day to day level…..
but it does mean that the goo that I have been, in whatever larval state, finally gets out of the cocoon and is transformed….or the warrior queen who strides my dreams actually goes and sits in a cave and refuses to study war no more.
And, something in me settles.
And when I feel it instead of think about it, I realize that, yes, there has been a surrender…where I feel less resistance to the real of my life.
Time is ripening me.
Life is softening me.
Like the flowers of the orchid that become, not wilted so much as translucent, until at last they fall.
A surrendering into life’s cycles. Dying in one, reborn into another, in THIS very lifetime.
The surrender will happen.
But words won’t make it so.
Dear Patti,
On 12/26/23, my 101-year-old mother began a precipitous decline. On 12/29, we made the decision (It was really made for us since she was not aware enough to swallow) to not administer any food, any fluids, any meds other than the comfort meds.
We'd been trying for a week to help her let go.
It finally dawned on me that, this being HER journey, she got to fight if she wants to and die as she lived--on her terms--insistent, defiant, exuberant for life.
The word that came to me then was surrender, a very hard concept for us westerners to embrace because it implies failure. It conveys loss--of results, of face. It means we've given up and given in.
Years ago, I embraced (intellectually, anyway), the practice of surrender as I understood it to be in eastern ways--trust. Trust of the self, the other, the universe, God.
Your writing reminds me of how "surrender" is for me a practice--a lifelong, in-and-out, up-and-down practice.
And how, when I touch it, the release and relief I feel is palpable.
As it is now ...now, that I've given myself permission to NOT control my mother's journey to Dad's arms; to recognize that it is not my place to make her conform to what I want her to do--go peacefully, easily into the night.
My Dad said and lived the words, “Do not worry about things over which you have no control.”
Surrender.
Thank you for your beautiful work.