There was a something I held onto for a long time. You may have your own version of it, so naming it might make this feel like my story instead of the thing underneath our stories. What I’ll say is this: I knew, for years, that I needed to let it go. I could explain why. I had walked through the reasons in prayer, in journals, in conversations with people I trusted. I understood surrender the way you understand a foreign language after learning it from Duolingo, technically you can speak it, but your not able to explain it.
The problem with surrender is that you can talk about it indefinitely while doing the opposite. I became quite fluent in the language of letting go.
Anthony DeMello has a line somewhere about how most people don’t want to wake up they want to dream about waking up. That landed pretty hard for me the first time I read it. Because that was exactly what I was doing. I was dreaming about surrender. Building a comfortable, well-furnished relationship with the concept of it. I said I wanted to wake up, but did I?
Holding on doesn’t always look like clenching. Sometimes it looks like understanding. Sometimes it looks like being articulate about your problem. Sometimes it looks like explaining it to other people while you keep doing it.
The Phrase That Never Quite Made Sense
Surrender to win is a recovery slogan. I heard it early in recovery and it struck me as the kind of thing that sounds profound until you try to do it, at which point it reveals itself to be essentially impossible. Surrender to win. It’s a paradox, and paradoxes are easy to appreciate from a distance.
What nobody told me, or maybe they did and I couldn’t hear it yet, is that surrender isn’t a decision you make. It’s a discovery like waking up. You don’t decide to stop fighting. You discover that you’ve been fighting something that was never going to lose, and the realization arrives not with fanfare but with a particular kind of tired.
What That Season Looked Like
There was a particular season somewhere in the middle of years that had already been teaching me things I hadn’t signed up to learn when I started noticing how much of my interior life was organized around something I couldn’t change. Not the dramatic varieties of uncontrollability. The quiet kind. The story I kept rehearsing. The conversation I kept having in my head. The outcome I kept trying to secure through the force of wanting it hard enough.
I was showing up to that inner argument every day. Like a second job.
If you look at any 12-Step program, their first step doesn’t say try harder. It talks about powerlessness and a life that had become unmanageable. It’s not describing the thing itself, the obvious problem that brought someone through the door. That the same language might apply to something quieter: what happens inside when reality doesn’t cooperate with your preferences. Everyone is powerless over something. Powerless over the outcome. Powerless over other people’s choices. Powerless, eventually, over the story you keep telling yourself about all of it. That’s a more unsettling version of the same idea. And probably the more important one.
When Something Loosened
I don’t remember the exact moment it shifted. That might be the most honest thing I can say about any of this.
I was expecting a door. A definite before and after. What I got was more like a slow loosening. The grip becoming gradually less my main occupation. Less the thing I woke up thinking about.
DeMello talks about awareness as something that does the work for you. Not that you force a transformation, but that you see clearly, and the seeing is what transforms. I used to find that frustrating. It sounded like spiritual advice for people whose problems weren’t real problems. But somewhere in that season I started to understand what he meant. Not because I had achieved clarity. Because I had gotten tired enough of the alternative.
There’s something to be said for exhaustion as a spiritual teacher. Nobody writes about it because it’s not inspiring, but sometimes the bottom of a long effort is the first place you can actually see from.
It’s Not a Technique
I want to be careful here, because this is where it gets slippery. The temptation, once you’ve lived through something that resembles surrender, is to make it into a method. A sequence. Here’s what it feels like, here’s how you know it’s working.
I have done this. I have described surrender to other people as if it were something transferable, something you could hand over wrapped and ready.
It isn’t.
You don’t really surrender to win because winning is the point. Most spiritual teachers will tell you this. The winning comes as a byproduct and only after you’ve genuinely stopped trying to win. That order matters more than it looks like it does. The winning is almost beside the point. What you get isn’t victory in the sense you were originally after. It’s something quieter. A little more room. A slightly looser relationship with outcomes. A reduction in the background noise of wanting things to be different than they are.
That’s not a small thing. After enough years of the alternative, it’s quite a lot.
I still hold on to things. I want to be honest about that. There are still arguments I rehearse, futures I try to secure, stories I prefer over reality. The difference is that I notice it faster now. And sometimes, just noticing is enough.
I also still deal with guilt and shame when I don’t notice and try to control people, places, or things. Driving like an idiot, making off handed comments, or trying to move a decision to benefit myself. That’s what this blog is about. trying to live a spiritual existence is tough but it is doable if we are willing to surrender every day.
That’s closer to what DeMello was pointing at. Not a victory you achieve. A waking up you keep doing.
