Surrender
A friend of mine died at the very start of Covid. His family said another kind of infection which no one could quite pin down was the culprit. I’ve always been upset by this. He was a man of exceptional clarity and wit and his last act should not have been a mystery.
An amateur writer and author of several self-published books, we talked about that endeavor whenever we met. About one project he told me, “I’ve put it in a drawer.” To be done with it for a while, perhaps forever, was the only way he could free himself from a story he could not make work.
For ten years I’ve been working on two ideas: schools should be workshops, not assembly lines, and paying people to give. I’ve imagined myself evangelizing these ideas, raising money for them, and building a business around them. But now I see I’ve been doing something else entirely, that my manuscript is, so to speak, all false starts and crossed-out passages. It belongs in a drawer.
I do mind failing. There are the what-ifs and regrets, the sunk cost of so much time, and the need for a new compass.
But it is also good to learn to surrender.
To accept oneself as one is regardless of what you do or have done is a healthy surrender. As is surrendering to what the world wants you to do instead of what you want to do to it.
And to surrender each day offers the rewards of practice since, eventually, we must surrender altogether. Ideally, we do that with more grace and humor than mystery or fear.