I recently had the privilege of being interviewed by Dr. Kristina Adams Waldorf for her podcast After He Said Cancer about my experience as a caregiver for two loved ones dying of cancer. Among the responses to our conversation was an inquiry about the process of surrender. I explore a response here.
What if Life doesn’t need to be different than Life is?
The essence of surrender is held in this radical question.
If we zoom out far enough in the midst of any difficulty we are encountering in our lives, we come upon the place where we have clamped on to the conviction that, “things should not be like this.” If we are feeling the need to come to (or at least entertain) surrender, this precise location in our heart/mind is where the mother lode of useful and actionable information can be found.
Several things are happening at this exact interval:
Suffering and/or the apprehension of suffering has provoked fear and overwhelmed reason.
Resistance to this perceived suffering has quickly kicked in and become busy about protecting against it. Often below our level of conscious awareness, it is fueled and amplified by the movement of natural emotions.
We have thus disengaged from full and simple presence in reality as it is actually unfolding.
We have entered a state that we have, however unconsciously, actually chosen to enter with our own will which was free to make this choice.
Now we are living in response to our own created world, and striving to control what does and doesn’t happen in it. Our response to suffering, or our apprehension toward the specter of potential suffering has brought us (unwitting) to the fool’s errand of assuming a throne in command of Life.
The fact that this does not and can not work dawns gradually, and again, we have a choice point:
Allow greater fear to lead us to double down in our resistance and herculean pursuit of a way to deny things or to change things OR
See the futility in trying to outsize Life itself, and release these efforts to seek a better way.
In the act of merely stopping the headlong fight we were in, even without a clue about what else on earth we should or could be doing, we shift to a pre-defense state. All of the built world we were inhabiting out of our resistance falls away for a moment and we are placed back on earth in actual reality as it is happening now.
Here is the golden moment in which we can, with our sovereignty over our own experience, choose again.
From this place we can entertain the possibilities:
What if Life doesn’t need to be different from how Life is?
What if my own imaginations and apprehensions are just that— imaginations and apprehensions?
What if, in ways I cannot always understand, Life is on all our sides all the time?
What if staying humbly and trustingly (even appreciatively?) placed at my own pay grade is the safest place I can be?
Wow. Just wow. I needed to read this right now. I think I might read it on a daily basis until it all sinks in. Then, I might need to write a piece about it. One way or another. I. WILL. SURRENDER.
In my experience it seems that the way things are is exquisitely and perfectly productive in ways I/we cannot now see, but become ‘visible’’ later. Both the effort and the surrender are needed.