“Surrender to win.”
- Anon
“You cannot fulfill your purpose when you are focused on
your own plans.” - Rick Warren
When life
brings us circumstances that vex us to the point that we are giving up
rent-free space in our head, we need a solution. All manner of things get us worked up –
expectations we have that life is going to cooperate with our will, desires
that plague us to the point we become irrational, realities that conflict with
fixed notions we have formulated in our head.
Often it is other people or institutions that are acting in a manner
that will interfere with the vision we have for our life. But whatever it is, we must realize that what
we resist persists. Ever notice that it
is when we “reach wits end” and give up on something that things start to
change? The reality of this life is that
we just invigorate the very things that we want to change by resisting
them.
But this is
where semantics plague us. We think that
surrendering to the reality of a situation is to give up on it entirely. This is not the case at all. For instance, say I have driven my car in the
ditch. I can stand there and complain to
the passengers that they were distracting me.
I can cuss the road builders for having built an unsafe road. I can whine how the suspension and tires on
the car are not adequate. But nothing is
going to get better until I quit trying to assign blame or make excuses and
surrender to the fact that my car is now in the ditch. Only then can I start looking at alternatives
or solutions to the circumstance I am facing.
Think this is trite? Well, think
about your last feud with someone that ended up resolving itself into a
friendship. At what point did the feud
end and the friendship begin? It
happened at precisely the moment you surrendered to the reality that the other
person is who they are, has done whatever it is they have done, realized that
we are powerless over their behaviors and decided to accept them just as they
are. As long as we continue to bicker,
plot, scheme, whine or engage in any other negative we are going to stay stuck
right where we are.
Just as
surrender does not equal quitting, powerlessness does not equate to
helplessness. We need to find the
internal calm and quiet to create the space for intuition to ease in, for new
attitudes to take root and new actions to become possible. And remember, this intuition does not tell us
why we are to take a new course of action, it simply prescribes the actions
that will achieve the best outcome for all involved. It is just another of the paradoxes of the spiritual
path – power comes from surrender, and surrender comes from the realization of
powerlessness. It will save us much aggravation
if we can keep this fresh in our mind so that we can utilize it the moment we
become disturbed.
Today, may I stay centered.
Happy Monday !!
David
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