Surrender Is Not Giving Up

But it can feel like it.

image of the Universe - courtesy of NASA

I’ve been talking lately about the idea that maybe the Universe is smarter than me. Maybe its vision is longer, its design greater, and it has the ability to play the game of Life on a board infinitely more complex than we can imagine. Maybe the Universe is the ultimate chess Grandmaster.

When something isn’t working in our lives like we want, maybe it’s wise to loosen our grip a little, to have more trust in the Universe. It has been playing the game far longer than us, after all. But also, this is WAY easier to say than to put into actual practice.

People with more wisdom than me have taught about this kind of surrender. And about how it is not the same thing as giving up. The thing is, though, it definitely feels like it. It doesn’t feel like just loosening our grip, or sitting back and taking a breath. It feels more like a defeat of some kind. The phrase letting go doesn’t help much, either.

Because we don’t want to let go, do we? Letting go feels like giving up hope, not like just handing over the reigns to someone more skilled. Maybe this has to do with the illusion of control. We make a lot of big and small life decisions, all the time, under a mistaken belief that we control much more than we do.

Like Liz Gilbert famously wrote in one of her journals, “You are afraid of surrender because you don't want to lose control. But you never had control; all you had was anxiety.” That’s pretty much it, isn’t it.

I’ve said similar things about how love, too, is infinitely more intelligent than us:

Love is always in alignment. Love is always in synch. Love is always on its game and in the flow. Unlike you and I, love does not need to trip, to stumble, to fall, in order to learn about cracks in the sidewalk, balance, gravity. Love is gravity. Love is the crack in the sidewalk.

-from More Than This - an essay in Happiness Is an Imaginary Line in the Sand

Maybe the answer isn’t an all or nothing leap. Maybe we can learn to let go a little bit at a time - of the reigns, of our illusions, of our ideas of how to play the game, and of our heartbreak over things we don’t yet understand. Baby steps, in other words.

the Heart Nebula - courtesy of NASA