Surrender...

Surrender is something you only come to know through abuse.  It is the deep and choking breath when you realize you are drowning and all of your resistance to the fact you are in way over your head finally gives way to a, perhaps, final surfacing.  What comes next?  Going down for good?  Or a change?

The moment right before surrender is painful.  It is excruciating really.  It is the moment where you believe that everything you are doing might just work.  Your absolutely futile strategies might actually turn around and make your life worth living, instead of putting you on the very, absolute edge of not being here anymore.

Surrender is hallowed ground.  But it is filled with pain, suffering, fear and a final resistance.  Surrender holds within it all the struggle, it is like surrender hones the struggle to a fine, sharp point and then aims it back at you in a way that really gives you two choices:  to stop what you are doing and see the futility of it all or die.

I have always thought of surrender as this surfacing breath like one might take when drowning, I never, until recently, thought about how that final breath would not be a good, life affirming one, I never thought until today, that it would, instead be a choking, painful and full of fear last gasp.  The amount of grace it takes to go from that to the cessation of struggle, to just giving into what is will never be fun and it will never be certain, but it will always be spiritual.  That moment between the struggle and the release is and always shall be, both incredibly painful and exquisite.

Surrender is a process.  It is not a one and done.  I mean I really wish it were.   I would have had this whole living thing by the balls a long time ago if it was just a one act show.  For me surrender has been this process that started one day when I faced the reality that I do not know what I am doing AND that my solutions for all the things I am fucking up is worse than the situations I am attempting to solve.  That is what surrender has brought me.  An ever deepening realization that life, my life, and my ideas about my life are flawed and I need intervention and guidance.

And you would think that as often as I have placed myself in this last gasp situation, I would have learned how to avoid putting myself in situations that walk that line between life and death.  But alas, that is not my fate.  I seem to need that edge to feel like I am living at all.  I seem to need to bring myself just to the brink of disaster, and then have to do a whole bunch of fucking work just to bring myself back to where I was before I started all this "living and problem solvin."

I do not know why I am this way.  I just have to accept that I am.  And I have learned along the way.  I know the level of my own dysfunction.  I see it.  I do amazing things to distract myself from it.  But in the end, I always know it is there.

It is funny, I always thought that the last breath before you went under would be peaceful.  And I, for the life of me, can’t right now think of why I ever thought that.  I mean if you are going down, why would it be peaceful?  Wouldn’t it be full of struggle and panic and dread. A futile freak out before the inevitable?  I am sure there are varied results.  I am sure your final breath before succumbing to the powers that be, whether that be ocean, dysfunction, abuse, living, dying, addiction, or whatever it is that threatens to remove you from the flow of life, really depends on how much surrender is found in that final breath.

Reading back over what I have written, I want to clear up that I am using drowning as a metaphor.  Not a hint that I am going to take myself out.  I am just metaphorically coming up for air after a long time treading water on a few particular issues that have plagued me for a long time.  I thought my surfacing would be peaceful and life affirming.  In reality, it just feels shitty.  My breath is ragged and spotty.  I feel lost and insecure.  I have surfaced and in that struggle to the surface of my own dysfunction, I see that whether I go down again depends completely on what I do next.

My ego is very loud this morning.  Counter pointing everything I am learning in the surrender.  My ego does not want this to be our last surfacing.  My ego wants to keep doing the same fucking bullshit over and over again. My ego only cares about right now. And saving face.  There is no truth in ego.

I guess the new thing I have learned about surrender, this time, is that I am never going to be done with this process.  No matter how often or deeply I surrender to reality, to truth, to honest assessment about who and what I am, there will always be another cause and opportunity to surrender.  And, additionally, I have learned that often what I think is surrender, is actually just me disguising another run at supreme management of my life and living.  Which, as we know, only brings yet another opportunity for surrender. Vicious cycle really.

I am tired.  Like really fucking tired.  I don’t want to have to surface again.  I don’t want to have to struggle to the top again.  I do not want to have to continue to battle my ego and lose, repeatedly.  And that is another thing about surrender I have learned this week: in order for surrender to really take hold, you have to be willing to let go of everything you think you know.  It is like you have struggled to the surface and everything within you says, “KEEP SWIMMING!  KEEP TRYING!”  And that feels true and right and the only option.  But then, without thinking, you realize there is another voice within, it is so quiet you can barely hear it.  But you stop all the flailing and just tread water for a moment.  And you realize this small, quiet voice is saying something ludicrous, “stop.  Just stop. Float.  No.  More.  Struggle.”

And everything within you says, “YOU WILL DIE IF YOU DO THIS!  THIS IS WRONG!  DO NOT LISTEN!  YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO HERE!”

But, somehow, over the clamor of your mind and all you think you know, despite having no confidence in whether or not that still quiet voice is death disguised as wisdom, or a harbinger to your final undoing, you listen anyway...over all the objections your rational (or irrational as the case may be) mind projects, you surface, and you float.

And for several moments that feel like lifetimes, you float between all you think you know and all that has not happened yet and you wait for whatever it is that comes next...death?  Defeat?  Depravity? The end?  

Only to find, that though those first breaths within surrender are ragged and desperate, the final ones are full, complete and other worldly.

And so you float on into whatever comes next after the final act of surrender, which is, the eschewing the belief that you know anything about this whole living and dying process at all...

Again, still...