How to Surrender Without Giving Up

Optimism eluded me, but I found something better.

Henry Farrer’s “Winter Scene in Moonlight” via Artvee.

I’m a late bloomer, which means I experienced a very uncomfortable “pre-bloom” stage—a time in my mid-thirties when my peers were blossoming into stunning sunflowers and exquisite orchids, while I remained a tight, hard bud.

My life was in a state of aspiration—writing and revising a novel I could never manage to finish, going on tepid dates with perfectly nice men, feeling rising panic at the growing number of book-party and baby-shower invitations in my mailbox.

I did have a pretty good career writing self-help stories for magazines and websites, and the work paid well enough to cover necessities like rent and groceries (in other words, a fortune by today’s standards), but I still couldn’t do the kinds of things I thought a woman my age should be able to do, like go on vacation or purchase furniture from anywhere other than IKEA. My life wasn’t bad; I just felt too old for it.

I was fortunate to be on the self-improvement beat, since I was too vain to ever read a self-help book without the excuse of work. As it was, I dove in. The authors and experts I interviewed said they knew how a person could attain the life they wanted, and I happily filled out their workbooks and road-tested their action plans.

Two pieces of advice came up repeatedly: I needed to be confident (which I’ve written about here), and I needed to cultivate a positive attitude. Developing these qualities would propel both my career and my love life. Confidence and positivity would whisk me out of my current situation—which too often meant spending my Saturday nights alone eating mac-and-cheese on my Gløstäd.

It made sense to me that taking a sunnier view of things would help move my life forward. But optimism has never been my strength because … I read the news. It was one thing to believe my own life would turn out nicely, but an informed person has to face the fact that overall things do not necessarily work out for the better.

Still, I tried. It was research! But pushing myself to be more hopeful and optimistic didn’t make me happier. Instead, it made me long for the things I didn’t have even more. It made me even more impatient for the future to hurry up and bring me what I wanted.

On the plus side, self-help led me to yoga, which is where I first heard the teachings of a Buddhist nun named Pema Chodron. Chodron’s wildly popular books, like The Wisdom of No Escape and When Things Fall Apart, have a self-help aspect to them in that she gives advice for how to live, but her message is fundamentally different from the other books I was reading at the time.

For one thing, Chodron isn’t really into hope. She’s actually kind of down on it.

“We’re all addicted to hope—hope that doubt and mystery will go away,” she writes in When Things Fall Apart.

Chodron explains that hope is the flip side of fear:

In the world of hope and fear, we always have to change the channel, change the temperature, change the music, because something is getting uneasy, something is getting restless, something is beginning to hurt, and we keep looking for the alternatives.

Chodron’s instruction is to stay. Stay with the fear and the longing, the anger and the anxiety. Let those feelings seep into your bones and see what happens.

So I tried it. On a lonely winter Saturday night, I sat quietly in the middle of my living-room floor for twenty minutes, feeling my pain. I relaxed into the tight sensation in my chest, and dove into the pangs in my heart—dread, loneliness, and the overall sense that I wasn’t good enough. I tried to observe these emotions with the detachment of a scientist.

• Elevated heart rate. Check

• Shallow breathing. Check.

• Clammy hands. Check.

When the timer went off, I made an important discovery: I didn’t die. A major part of my pain was my judgment of it—I’m envious, therefore I’m a terrible person; I’m lonely, therefore I’m a loser. When I dropped the judgment part—when I recognized that everyone feels envy and loneliness sometimes—I realized that the pain itself wasn’t that bad. I called fear’s bluff; by letting it in, I defanged it.

It was a wonderful moment of discovery, and from there I developed a regular meditation practice. At first, I was very excited about this new way of approaching my life. After a while though, things flatlined. Oh great, another Saturday night of feeling my pain. But I kept at it because it was making me feel calmer, and because I didn’t have anything better to do.

Those years felt very static, especially as I witnessed friends ticking through their life milestones. But that time turned out to be one of the most important and transformative periods of my life.

I started re-reading When Things Fall Apart this month—for all the obvious reasons.

I’m in a different place now. Today my problem isn’t that I fear I’m a failure; it’s the realization that I live in a failed state. When I was younger, the future was a shiny castle I could never quite reach. Now the future is a distant tropical storm, gathering strength and heading to my village.

Before, creating a better future meant working on myself. Now, personal development seems laughably irrelevant. Before, relaxing into my pain was the whole game. Now, that seems woefully inadequate to meet this moment.

Things have fallen apart in a way my mid-thirties self could not have fathomed, and the efforts of countless good people couldn’t stop it. Millions of postcards and phone calls and door knocks couldn’t stop it. Truckloads of money couldn’t stop it. The U.S. justice system couldn’t stop it. Rhodes Scholars and Harvard PhDs couldn’t stop it. George Clooney and Taylor Swift couldn’t stop it.

We’ve been humbled, and not in an “I just won an Oscar” kind of way.

We lost, but accepting this loss feels wrong. Too many people are going to be hurt.

I’ve been struggling with how to work with all this and was glad to find this recent episode of Dan Harris’ 10% Happier podcast, where former Buddhist nun Kaira Jewel Lingo explains that you can surrender without giving up:

We’re still caught when we give up. The situation still has us somehow. Whereas when we surrender and say, “Look, this is how it is. There is no way for me to change this,” we free ourselves. We free our energy up to then relate to it differently. But when we give up, we’re still somehow trapped in the story that this could be different. And I think the surrender piece is actually a power place; it’s a place of power when we simply open to “this is how things are.”

When we drop the resistance and soften into the situation, we can find peace even when life is really hard. We can start to deal with reality, rather than wishing for things to be different. Giving up means pulling down the shades and getting under the covers. Surrendering means accepting the situation as it is and working from there.

Producer DJ Cashmere, who conducted the interview, adds that Lingo says sometimes it’s OK to give up:

There are moments in our lives where giving up really is the best we can do. Circumstances are so overwhelming that our best bet is to just shut down. Our best bet is to just walk away, and we might just need to be done with something at least for the time being. And she says that can also be healed, that can also be worked with.

In other words, you can surrender to the fact that you can’t surrender right now.

That podcast helped me make the connection between the very personal work I was doing when I was younger and the current, much graver situation we’re all in now.

I’m staying with the fear because denying it or pushing it away won’t help. I’m relaxing into the situation as it is not because I condone it, but because I want to understand how to best engage it.

I don’t think it’s giving up. I think it’s preparing for what’s next, even if we don’t yet know what that is.

What’s your best strategy for handling this moment?