Learning to Surrender

Photo: Reflecting while kayaking - Livingston, Montana (2017). Copyright SJPhotography

Learning to Surrender

There is an old and well-known idiom that says “it is always darkest before the dawn.” It is meant to suggest that when we are at the heights of personal suffering and there looks to be no reprieve that we are in fact the closest to the end of our suffering and hardships. Yet we can get lost in the darkest moments – feeling stuck in this shadowy waiting room of life wondering if the dawn will ever come. This state of limbo can leave us mired in the murky nightmare that leaves our hearts, mind, and body weary from what seems like a never-ending night.

If we are truthful with ourselves, aware of how we are feeling, and able to stand back and observe what is happening in our experience we can begin to see all that is happening with our feelings, emotions, and outward actions. When we sit in this particular darkness – this unbidden purgatory may show up as depression, despair, or deep ennui. We are left to wonder if the dawn was a dream and will ever come again. We begin to wonder if life will have any of the joy, sunshine, light, and tenderness that it once did. Even as we embrace the moment – and shift our focus to this space of here and now, and all that is – the shade of it seems endlessly dark or tarnished in some way – never to be what it was in our last breath or in another moment – that somehow felt better than this, or at least we remember it that way.

What follows is panic, and a desperate feeling to try everything in our power to get away from this feeling and to change everything that does not fit with how it all – we think – should be. We try to force our will and new strategies onto our life – to change it – make it better, try something new, try something different, try harder, try to move beyond whatever this pit of heavy darkness is and leave it, and get away from it as fast as possible. Trying and trying becomes the whirring, grating mechanism in the back of our mind that pushes us to do more – to move beyond what is and beat down the floorboards and the walls of our world that are not what we want, had planned or can accept. Trying becomes the haunted echo in the inner world of our being – the wounded voice shouting to keep going and keep trying for more and more and more; to be free of this dark feeling and shadowy place.

Trying seems to be the go-to source of relief in times of despair and darkness. Trying is what is left on the empty cupboards of our overstretched and exhausted inner shelves sometimes. We lean into hoping and trying – one last “hail mary” to bring back the dawn. One more attempt at going the extra mile that will surely pull us out of this weighted state and bring back the light. Trying and trying for a little glimmer of light and hope.

Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.

_Albert Einstein, “Ideas and Opinions”