Are you able to let go, to really surrender to life, to let it take you wherever it sees fit?
I know I’m not. I try. But if I catch myself, that surrender comes easiest when there’s a bit of security around me. The belly is sated, a bit of cash sits in the bank, a loved one nearby.
True surrender, of course, doesn’t work that way. If life has deemed it time for cancer or a firing squad, we’re inclined to re-take the wheel. Like a smooth flight gone bad, life’s unwanted turbulence brings the mind screaming back into things and reasserting its control.
Only, there is no control. Never has been, never will be. The mind’s control is an illusion – a self-constructed delusion.
If cancer or a drunk driver is coming for you, it’s going to get you.
The other day my wife shared the story from many years earlier, about landing a job she’d wanted for more than a year, about how one of the executives immediately thought of her when a particular job became available.
That’s how life works: spontaneously, now, always and only now. The thought blossoms into an executive’s awareness. “Her. We’ll hire her.”
Every thought ever registered was born the same way: it just happened. The great geniuses and artists weren’t brilliant anymore than the despots and tyrants were evil: they just were. Looked at another way, someone had to play the role, someone had to be life’s receiver / transmitter / conduit, spawning love and hate, art and war.
It’s only afterwards that the mind claims ownership. “I” did this or that. I’m to blame or to be admired, I fucked it all up or I created this marvelous success.
You didn’t do any of it, friend, and it’s not all that difficult to see for yourself. You are no more responsible for the thoughts in your head than you are the processing of food in your belly, the division of cells in your liver, or the color of the skin wrapped around your bones.
Life and you are happening. You are being lived. As one of my favorite teachers puts it, your name should be a verb. As in, I am Douging my way through life.
I suspect this is why some of the earliest spiritual teachings talk about god being closer to us than our own breath – which is to say, god IS our breath. We don’t see, think, hear, breathe – god or life or creation or whatever does it. All of it.
Or consider it from this perspective: when you were still very young, before all of those ahead of you had taught you that you had a name and that you were separate and apart from everything around you, who or what was seeing the world? What was hearing, tasting, feeling, experiencing? What was crying and giggling and writhing and pissing? It wasn’t you, remember, because you hadn’t been taught about you yet. So what was it that life was flowing in and through?
No, I don’t need to worry about surrendering, because I never had any control to begin with.
