SURRENDER

Surrender was a word I didn't want to get near. I heard defeat as if I were an army and if I surrendered to the other side I and my cause would be a total failure. To surrender is to stop fighting and I thought if I didn't fight I would be trampled, flattened by the world. 
     Eventually, I heard the word in a different way. To surrender is to let go of my desperation - to change myself, to get what I want, to make everyone and everything do what I want. That kind of fighting is a terrible burden to carry - I used to feel it was three o'clock in the morning and I had to figure everything out by dawn or I would be taken out and shot. The best description of what that anxiety feels like is from Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner:

     Like one, that on a lonesome road
     Doth walk in fear and dread, 
     And having once turned round
     Walks on and no more turns his head
     Because he knows a frightful fiend 
     Doth close behind him tread.
     
     Who wouldn't want to surrender that? This kind of surrender is about letting go of the frantic need to get to the  bottom, control, fix, get what I want. Not only is that desire for complete control impossible to have, it's the desire of someone who views everyone else as a object in her world, not a full human being. It's the sign of a neurotic vanity that says, you must do everything, control everything, but of course you can't control it all and you wind up thinking yourself a failure.   
    When I surrender I'm taking my tight little hands and clawing fingers off the controls. As soon as I do, relaxation comes, the kind that lets in air and light. No fighting, no pressure - only an open hand. That opening hand is the gesture that takes me beyond my willful desperate ego, and allows me to be precisely where I am in the moment. I see clearly the futility of my trying to impose answers and fix all the things I think are wrong with me. I realize that I am no judge of anything that has to do with me; my thoughts and opinions about my place in the world, all the sentences that start with "I should have" or "What if" come out of fearful and doubting ego. 
     No more trying to impose answers and fixes and my will on the world. I open my hand, relax and allow possibilities, answers to emerge from that surrendered place. It's one of the many paradoxes, that giving up the need for control, opening my hand, leads not to defeat but to the possibility of real change.