Surrender as a non-stupid life strategy

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After getting everything I wanted in my 20s, and discovering that I was still miserable, I decided that I should no longer be in charge of choosing what I want, and I slowly settled into a frame of, “I’ll do whatever God seems to want from me.”

Some years after making that decision, I’m much happier. My life is richer, and I’m doing more for others. Regularly, I react with positive disbelief when I look at what my life has become. It looks like I’ve been executing a genius strategy. But in reality, I am living in a state of ongoing confusion, just seeing what happens.

If you’ve achieved a bunch of your goals, and you’re still not happy with your life, consider giving up on self-chosen plans. Instead, listen to your life, inner and outer, and see if you can feel a current. Then fall into it, especially if it has nothing to do with the story you had about where you were supposed to be going.

This choice is known as surrender. As with most cliches, I don’t think I can explain the profound experiential content of surrender—what it feels like, why it works. But perhaps I can lay out a constellation of propositions¹ that will, together, illuminate a worldview very different from the one I once inhabited.

Knowing and not-knowing yourself

1.1 The planning part of your mind, the one that generates ambitions and hypothetical situations, is a small part of your overall intelligence. Anyone who is halfway good at sex, comedy, or any creative art will know this. Designing your life based on what that part of your mind wants is like designing your house to fit the needs of your right hand. Congratulations, your house is filled with fidget spinners and soap.

1.2 A large percentage of human suffering is anticipatory tension, or dreading a future experience such that you actualize its potential suffering in the now. Anticipatory tension is using the illusion of knowledge to generate the illusion of control. Much of what people call planning is this.

1.3 My best outfits are all selected by someone else. When I’m at a clothing store, and I meet an employee who seems engaged, I tell them to dress me for maximum attractiveness. They do a much better job than I do. Of course: I can’t see myself as well as someone else can. This is why I try to listen to what the world apparently wants to do with me, rather than who I imagine I am.

1.4 Often, our self-image is a defense against the traits we reject in ourselves. “I love to be spontaneous,” says the most calculating person you’ve ever met. Thus, if you’re trying to live in self-loathing and denial, one way is to sculpt your life around the self-image you’ve decided on.

1.5 I’ve discovered that scrutinizing my motives too closely is a great way to stop creating. The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the fully examined life is a pinned butterfly in a glass case. I’ve concluded that my life is a grand artistic project, but I’m best off not knowing what it is.

1.6 You know that person who had important ripple effects in your life, based on a brief meeting or a kind gesture they extended to you, which meant nothing to them, but everything to you? Or that interesting stranger whose manner cast a brief spell on you, lingering in your memory disproportionately? That’s you also, you’re that person. Most of your impact on others, you will never fully apprehend or appreciate. Thus, it’s not important to know what you’re doing.

1.7 The proper end of introspection is not being filled with facts about oneself. Your introspection is successful if it is finite, if it leads you towards direct contact with experience. Get out of the way of your becoming.

Choice and authenticity

2.1 People feel most themselves when they are unselfconscious, which is to say, their actions emerge without apparent control. Think of the phrase “singing with abandon.” In our most profound moments of intimacy, we have abandoned the wheel. Who is driving, at that moment? What if we simply let that driver have the wheel more often? It takes practice to notice when that’s the person taking over the wheel—as opposed to our reactive, fear-based conditioning, which is also eager to take the job. Surrender is a skill.

2.2 When people talk about “being authentic,” they are often referring to executing some program, some persona, that they’ve devised privately. Of course, our impression of such people is that they’re unnatural and unoriginal. They assign us the job of reinforcing a character we never agreed on.

2.3 Surrender is something that happens through you, not something chosen². I couldn’t have skipped the part of my life when I was contriving everything. And the way I’m living now wouldn’t work without the skills I accumulated during that period of contrivance. If you’re reading this and thinking, “gosh, I wish person x would see the wisdom of surrender,” you have discovered an opportunity to surrender to interpersonal helplessness.

2.4 Often, the apparent struggle to make a decision is an attempt to meet an internal flailing quota, after which we will feel affirmed in the choice we already knew we were making. Sometimes you can just skip all of that, and admit that you’re scared of what you know you will do. And then do it.

Goals, outcomes, effort

3.1 Discovered goals are entirely different from preconceived goals. Let’s say you notice that when you play guitar and sing, people stop what they’re doing to stare at you. The discovered goal of being a musician has presented itself. You are more likely to be successful than someone who privately dreams of being a musician without prompting from existence. Noticing such opportunities requires a lack of some previously decided agenda.

3.2 I’ve known many impressive people. Almost none of them started with a comprehensive vision of the grand work they would produce. Instead, they simply got into escalating amounts of trouble, and kept riding the trouble wave as far as it would go.

3.3 Excellence requires non-attachment to principles. All mediocre performers are the same: instead of improving on feedback from what happens, they react to what they think is supposed to be happening, or try to reinforce a theory they’ve internalized—perhaps an inaccurate approximation of someone they admire. This attempt at coherence is futile, since the mind of an expert makes no sense. It is filled with exceptions, contradictory principles butting up against each other. Perhaps the knowledge of how your life works is the same.

3.4 When a project in my life is working, it’s typically marked by a sense of leverage. It’s as if I’ve fallen into an updraft and it’s propelling me. Meanwhile, when I’m privately excited about something, but there’s no cooperation from the world, nothing comes together. The sensible conclusion is that my enthusiasm, alone, is not a helpful measurement.

3.5 It’s nice to enjoy what you’re doing. But there is a greater liberation available: accepting that the Work in front of you is your Work, and that has little to do with how you feel.

3.6 Another property of things that work out for me: they don’t make sense to my rationalizing mind. There is the thought, “this isn’t what I’m supposed to be doing,” even as greater forces pull me forward. This is known as the refusal of the call to adventure. It’s a routine part of adventure.

3.7 There is a criticism you could make of my advocacy of surrender. It is: “you’re just lucky and narrativizing it.” Yes. If you, too, have luck that seems unrelated to your conscious choices, consider letting that run the show.

Happiness

4.1 The norm for human life: gross injustice, corrupt rulers, disease and death, unequal fortunes, looming apocalypses. It’s possible that a large portion of our species will die off—it’s happened before, we’ve almost gone extinct previously, that’s allowed in the game. If your basic needs are met but you cannot be content with the way it is now, that is not the fault of the way things are now. It’s because you haven’t surrendered to the basic properties of incarnating in human form.

4.2 Strangely, happiness isn’t produced by getting what you want. Unhappiness is the product of the number of times per minute that you believe circumstances should be otherwise. “Enough” and “not enough” are mental stances that, very often, are uncorrelated with exterior facts. Perhaps this is one reason Jesus says it is “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”—the more you focus on expanding your pile, the more ravenousness becomes a habit. By contrast, you can, right now, try believing that what’s happening is what’s supposed to be happening, in exactly the right order.

4.3 Satisfaction comes from giving yourself away. From realizing that you have been called to some occasion that requires everything from you, and saying, fine, fuck it, here I am, tear me apart, I will exhaust myself to set right this one irrelevant corner. It is possible to view your whole existence this way, as a process of giving away all, everything, of what was never yours.

4.4 Another profound source of satisfaction is fit: when you fit like a slender hand in the glove of your circumstances. Consider the possibility that this satisfaction is already trying to happen, but you are resisting it, in a doomed attempt to be happy. Settling into this fit is another way of describing what I mean by “doing what God seems to want.”

4.5 I can’t defend this intellectually, but it has been true in my experience: spontaneous compassion is the approach to ethics that feels best and works most often. If you want a plan for consistently being good, the dumbest one that will work, and therefore the most robust, is “notice that prosocial behavior is nourishing, and that peace is only available if you’re on good terms with your conscience, and allow behavior to flow from that.” I’m not deluded enough to think this is always sufficient, but it’s a good start.

Love

5.1 I am capable of privately spoiling my wonderful marriage at any time, by noticing that it’s not the relationship I would’ve imagined being in. Meanwhile, a few months before meeting my wife, I wrote down a list of characteristics that the perfect partner would have, and I subsequently met that person. She was completely lovely—I find much to criticize in my own behavior from that period and nothing bad to say about her. And yet the relationship did not stick. How odd.

5.2 When I insist that a relationship must survive, I begin to resent it—I become burdened by all of the little moments of inauthenticity engaged in to shield the other person. The person becomes an obstacle, someone to navigate around. When I accept that any relationship could end, and surrender to the reality of people finding their own level, I become free to relate openly, and then actual closeness happens.

5.3 Panic is a part of love. I’ve learned that as I enter into any relationship that will alter me for the better, the manager in my head will come up with convincing reasons why it’s all wrong. This, too, is the refusal of the call; it is the fear of personal transformation masquerading as reason.

5.4 The older I get, the more that friendship is a discovered property. There are lots of wonderful people I meet who aren’t my friends. And then I meet someone and think: oh, that’s my friend, you’re coming with me. One of the best things you can do for yourself is to notice when you’re inexplicably bound to someone, and act on it without thinking.

5.5 We are drawn towards people because they are different. We are given the opportunity to love more when we find ourselves resenting them for the very difference that drew us to them. The opportunity is to release resentment and instead surrender to separateness. Ironically, this is how you feel less alone.

Thank you to Erin Shetron for editorial assistance. This essay was inspired a little bit by The Surrender Experiment, and a lot by this totally wonderful meditation guide. Photo credit goes to Daido Moriyama.

1. This format is shamelessly stolen from this fascinating essay by “de Pony Sum.”

2. I first heard this point made by Adyashanti.