#4: On Surrender

Time goes on, and everything changes

This letter is part of a series exploring life as an immigrant through personal notes to friends. Three years after leaving home, I’m sharing stories and lessons I’ve learned, not as advice, but as honest reflections on what it means to rebuild yourself in a new place. I write these letters so we might all feel less alone in our individual journeys.

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Dear friend,

This season, I’ve been learning what it means to sit with silence and surrender. Surrender to the small and big things, the ebbs and flows of life, to trusting the divine in everyday mundane life. It sounds simple when I write it like that, it hasn’t been.

I’ve been that person who forced things. I needed them to stay within my control and conform to my idea of what they should be and how they should turn out. Hurtling headfirst through life, convinced that momentum was the same thing as progress.

In the Bible, the character I relate to most is Jacob — that man wrestled with an angel. I used to like that idea. I, too, could wrestle and fight my way into a blessing. But the best moments of my life, the ones that have held me spellbound, are moments I never would have orchestrated myself.

Tommy Dixon wrote:

In rare moments of reverie, I hold the conviction that life is this achingly beautiful story. In its shoeless summer days and still winter nights. In the falling in love and falling out of love. Moving away and missing people and trying so hard to be better than you were yesterday. The heartache and homesickness, the joy that comes with the morning, the memory of those days you know are never coming back. How time just continues on and everything changes and there’s no way we can stop it. Even when life hurts, it’s a sweet and vicious pain.

At the start of the year, I felt a lot of momentum. Maybe you did too. I set my intentions for the year and stayed true to my commitments — working out four times a week, writing daily, putting in my best at work, and devoting time to friends and loved ones. For a brief moment, I felt in control and that felt powerful.

Then life started to unfold. Unexpected events happened, and it felt like the rug was pulled beneath me. I won’t go into the details here, perhaps in the next letter. But I imagine you’ve felt something like this before. The moment when the thing you were holding together starts to slip.

At first, I tried to hold on tightly. But when life moves in one direction and you force it in another, you learn the hard way.

A friend told me recently, “You can’t fight gravity.” It stuck with me because that was exactly what I’d been doing. Fighting gravity. And that’s why it all felt so hard– like a sieve trying to hold water. There are simply things in life that remain completely out of your control.

But I knew this already.

I’ve long accepted that my path in life would be unconventional. That my journey in a foreign land would force me to untangle the parts of my life that have been knotted. I knew I would have to let go, again and again. Even when it felt so hard, especially then.

It’s easy to form anchors in life. You anchor yourself to places, people, titles. These anchors shape your identity and your belief in who you are and what you are capable of. But the challenge is when those external things are taken away or lost, your whole sense of self shakes. And then what?

When I finally went still, the clarity was like water. A mirror was held up and I could see the patterns, the cyclical nature of events and lessons, and the ways I had contributed to them. Some things were out of my control, but so many others were well within my control too.

A big part of growth is learning to surrender. Giving yourself over to the current of this one wild precious life. You give yourself to the twists and turns along the way, the chance encounters, the synchronicities, the grace hiding in ordinary days.

When you take the reins on what you can control and release what you can’t, something opens up. As painful as the process may be, surrender holds a certain beauty. It becomes liberating.

Be still and know that I am God – Psalms 46:10

Minnow shared this with the writing group once, his words for guided meditation. With each deep breath, he strips the words back one after the other, until all that is left is be. Just be. Here and now. So simple in theory, but hard in practice.

I come back to this whenever I feel like I’m forcing something. I remember to live as one breathes. To take in and let go.

I hope you find a moment of stillness this week, wherever you are.

As always,

Clare