One of the toughest lessons we learn in life is that ‘reality’ doesn’t care what we think or how we feel. Reality is just ‘what is’—the permanent state of ‘isness’. This isn’t a philosophical idea. It is one of those ‘obvious’ aspects of consciousness and existence that is true no matter what we believe, a kind of a priori truth such as ‘all bachelors are unmarried’. This idea about “reality just being what is” is tough to get because we spend most of our lives thinking and acting inside the notion that reality is ‘the problem’ and that it ‘should be’ something other than it is and that ‘we need to exercise some control over reality’ to get what we want in life.
Buddhism has this idea about reality at the center of its worldview. Practitioners spend years and years meditating and living ‘mindfully’ to learn to just let reality be what it is and to give up trying to change it, resist it or hang on to it. Just let it be. Live life on life’s terms. They even go further—to ‘be’ all of it, to be ‘one with’ the whole of existence. But even if you don’t go that far, the starting point is acceptance of ‘what is’ and giving up the addictions we have to cope with and/or control everything in sight.
A key concept in this kind of thinking is ‘surrender’. The concept of surrender is greatly misunderstood by most of us. We think of it as a ‘bad thing to do’—an admission of weakness and a state of being vulnerable. The mistake is to think that to surrender means the same as to succumb, to be beaten down, overpowered and defeated. The difference between the two terms is…CHOICE.
One must choose to surrender. One succumbs only when coerced and forced into submission.
To choose ‘what is’ allows us to be in the present, to ‘go with the flow’, to live life without resistance—what Werner Erhard used to call ‘riding the horse in the direction it is going’.
Surrender is profound acceptance. It is the key to serenity and happiness.
Surrender is the opposite of resistance. It is a prerequisite for mastery of anything and the key to creating power and possibility in life. Great leaders surrender to their vision and those they lead. Great athletes give themselves to their coaches and their ‘game’. And anyone who has ever experienced some form of spiritual ‘connection’ has surrendered to something beyond themselves.
Most of us resist growing older in one way or another. The most extreme form of resistance might be ‘denial’. More subtle forms can look like ‘preaching’ to the young about the way it was or like ranting in self-righteous indignation at real or perceived forms of ‘ageism’. Few of us are prepared to truly surrender to growing older and dying. Instead, we live in our self-centric internal conversations about the way we feel and what we think and what we like and don’t like as if our thinking was superior to the inevitable and undeniable march of time.
I am not suggesting that anyone ‘buy into’ the culturally defined story that older means decline and loss of the power, possibility and passion that for most of us is what has made life worth living. On the contrary. I am committed that we have a choice about how we experience growing older. We have an opportunity to transform aging into a unifying principle that can unite and mutually inspire every generation so that the last third of life is viewed and lived as being as much a positive and empowering phase of life as any other.
But for this to be, we must each arrive at the moment when we acknowledge that we are aging and that our mortality is becoming more and more of a ‘reality’—not some distant event that we understand but rarely grasp and almost never choose as a fundamental part of being alive. Whatever difficulties occur in our lives, we have a choice about how we relate to them. When we surrender and choose them to be what they are, then we are free to create and act in whatever ways we can imagine. When we choose resistance, we can only react to our circumstances and we end up suffering the consequences of living in a ‘should be’ relationship with life. Resistance…in the end…means we will succumb.