Surrender

The moment we need a solution is the very moment we now have a problem

I can feel the resistance building, like water rising behind a dam. My attention is fractured, the tasks pile up.

I create, edit and publish a weekly video, write, produce and record a bi-weekly podcast, run a Patreon, write this Substack, and still coach one-off clients, all while trying to keep a twelve-ton vessel safe and afloat that contains my home and my family, while navigating from new and unfamiliar port to new and unfamiliar anchorage every few days, through perpetually changing countries, cultures, weather and conditions.

All of these outputs fulfill me in different ways, and I enjoy them for different reasons — I believe in democratizing fulfillment and exploring a variety of passions and pursuits. And mostly, each of these projects rotate in their own cycles, moving in their own individual patterns like waves across the ocean. As they come to shore one by one, I meet them and move through phases (some just a couple of days, some longer) of being more devoted to one than the others, allowing them all to balance, for the most part, in the aggregate.

But sometimes the wave interference pattern all lines up in just a way that one massive trough is made, bringing me to a full stop across all domains. Days go by. And more days. Nothing has gone out, nothing has been published for what seems like much too long now, and then it just gets longer. Inspiration seems to wither, drive begins to decline, and crickets chirp in every corner of my creativity.

This pressure to do something mounts behind the dam and I sit in defiance, staring directly at the wall as it quivers and creaks, my eyes wide in concern, but I wait, and wait and wait, not moving a muscle, foolishly committed to some obscure objection to even attempt to open a valve that would make it all feel like fun again.

But is it so foolish, after all? Sometimes I don’t want to make it better, I don’t want to relieve the pressure, I don’t want to find the hack around the blocks through to productivity, I don’t want the solution to the friction.

I don’t want to overcome it. I want to surrender.

We tend to fancy ourselves conquerers, don’t we — small but mighty individual forces up against all odds, with peace always a distant promise lying in wait on the other side of whatever towering wall we are up against.

Our language is abundant in its implicit fortification of this image: we are fighters, survivors, achievers, warriors, life nothing but a set of obstacles to overcome and mountains to climb. Our culture unwittingly pits us against nearly everything that is not us (and even, most that is us), and we dutifully trudge into battle daily, reaching for our weapons of control, discipline, strength, and dominance against the world and circumstances we happen upon, both within and without.

I read once about a training exercise in the Navy SEALS curriculum where cadets’ arms and legs are bound and they are pushed into a pool -- the mission: to survive. The tendency for anyone in this position is to fight. To panic. To resist.

But the wrath does nothing to secure safety, it only extinguishes energy and breath. The actual path for survival is one that seems wholly counterintuitive: to allow your body to sink like a pin to the bottom, where you can then effortlessly push off of the floor and rocket to the surface for your next breath — a cycle that can be maintained with relative ease for as long as needed.

This approach alchemizes panic to peace — the fight against distilled to an effortless balance, an unexpected harmony revealed to those who do what seems unwise: relax, release, surrender.

I used to be a fighter. Thrashing at the surface, gasping for air, depleting myself with every exhausting attempt to assert ironclad control over the circumstances of my life. Bound by perceived disadvantages, blocks, and deficiencies, I would push, punch, and perpetuate an upstream battle against it all.

I still feel the urge to push back against every problem, to conquer it, to somehow dissolve every challenge, creative or otherwise, through sheer force and muscle. Because to relax into the waters of all that life demands is uncomfortable, especially when everything seems like life and death, ringing of equal urgency, the clock ticking away like a bomb while breath runs out, helplessly bound by one constraint or another, the pressure never relenting, instead somehow still climbing and climbing into a towering, taunting Goliath concrete wall of overwhelm.

Most of the time I love everything I’m doing. I signed up for this. Things flow, there’s time for it all. But when the rhythms of all of these various enterprises pile up just so, the flow is blocked and the mounting pressure to create, do, teach, publish, advise, and be of service becomes heavy and dense and scary. And where I once saw these moments as a problem, and would immediately launch into the search for solutions and tools and weapons to overcome and conquer, I now choose to surrender to them entirely, and bob gently in the open space.

Because sometimes I don’t want to make my life into a lesson, a tv show, an education. Sometimes I don’t want to be of service, I don’t want to find some gem in the chaos. Sometimes I don’t want to wrap it all in a tidy bow, I don’t want to constantly mine every experience in my life for some valuable takeaway or entertaining story.

Recently I have found that just because the instinct to fight and dominate the circumstance is here — even when it’s a loud, hot tantrum that’s screaming about some needed and forceful fix — doesn’t mean it’s right. Recently I have found the fight doesn’t always bring the peace we think it will. Recently I’ve been evaluating what I even regard as a problem at all. Recently I have been practicing standing unguarded, weaponless, defenseless, and wide open — no longer in the fight, instead surrendered to the rhythms of reality.

When life is a war, surrender seems like defeat. It rings with weakness, with apathy, laziness, or as some personal failing. Everything is a problem to overcome and the search for the solution is a life-sucking thrashing, an uphill climb, an effort that often does little more than deplete and exhaust and sustains nothing other than a painful battle: resistance to what is.

The philosopher Alan Watts once said that the moment we decide we need a solution is the very moment we now have a problem. When I find myself lost in these energetically expensive efforts of summoning force and control against whatever waters I’ve found myself in, I remember that the peace I’m seeking isn’t on the other side of defeating the Goliath and declaring my dominance over it all. It is in the setting down of the weaponry altogether, and relaxing into it. The truth is that the moment we decide to stop fighting and pushing is the exact moment the war ends. Because it never actually began. The pressure evaporates, because it was never really there at all.

Having my hands in so many creative endeavors means that in order to do them well — no, in order to have them bring me the fulfillment and joy that I know they can — I must yield to the seasons where inspiration is absent, and I must allow for the moments of disinterest and disconnection that are a part of any path we walk long enough. I must trust that nothing here is a problem to be solved, but a part of the process altogether. I must allow the emails to go unsent and the work to go unpublished, even if it makes me squirm, because I know that to surrender to these moments is paradoxically the very thing that reliably ushers in not only peace, but new sparkling waves of ideas and a fresh excitement for it all. No fight is required: the surrender is precisely the thing that sustains it.

Surrendering to the rhythms of life may seem at first like sinking, like we’re carelessly forfeiting our tools of control or force — and to be fair, sometimes, following the impulse to fight is precisely what we need.

But I’ve found that this steady, gentle welcoming of whatever is here to be a surprising superpower, a strength of its own kind. One that brings me right up to the surface of experience, offering a sustainable and harmonious engagement with the always unpredictable waves of circumstance.

I’ve found that this entire time, always lying quietly beneath every panicked instinct to fight, every stressful search for solutions, every thrashing of fear, is an option to effortlessly float. And it’s often all we need to do to release the pressure and be able breathe again.

xo, Taylor

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