Surrender
Growing up in a family with seven children, there was much inevitable competition amongst me and my siblings. Whether over whose possessions were truly whose or where the invisible boundary lines of sharks and minnows were in the backyard; we competed to win, finish first, to retain our individuality. I did, at least.
Later in highschool and college, I developed some very unhealthy self-expectations. If I got a B it might as well have been an F. If I was not striving, not actively enduring pain in some way it was not work, being productive, or something to inspire pride. Pride was reserved for those things which symbolized endurance and strife. Anything else was a form of failure.
As flawed as Alan Watts’ writing is in more scholarly or ethnographic lenses, I recommend his writing on a regular basis. Especially to those I know are consumed by the same need for strife, whether imposed or self-created, as was I.
This is because Alan Watts offered the average Westerner many new perspectives to which we’re not typically exposed, none so important to me as the ability to Surrender. What does this mean? To surrender in the face of competition? To lose with grace and sportsmanship? Surely learning to lose on purpose is no virtue.
The issue with these questions I and many others have asked is that they arise from a fundamental misunderstanding. When one is learning to Surrender, there is nothing to win nor anything to lose. The idea of competition and failure are foreign to the process of Surrender. One cannot strive to obtain Surrender, nor is it something one can achieve by wanting it.
Let’s break down what exactly I mean. To Surrender, one must submit to someone or something else. Why is this desirable? The answer for me is fairly simple: life is hard and I’ve yet to experience an ounce of just how truly mean it can be. No one can change that. No one ever has. Instead of fighting against things I don’t like and creating strife, why not focus on how I may best flow with my experience and how I may optimize the experiences of others?
I am not saying it is virtuous for one to simply lay down all day every day or to constantly procrastinate. What I propose is surrendering to a path of action and leaving it at that. If I have submitted myself to a task in every way, the mental effort to perform has already been reduced to near nothing. It is something I do, because I’ve surrendered to it. No strife, no straining, painful effort; simply bending to the needs of life like a river around a harsh rock bed. Doing what I can and Surrendering the results leaves me with my side of the street cleared and a list of fulfilled obligations.
Test prep and college applications cause stress and anxiety. That’s par for the course. However, one can only change what one can change. Worrying about anything else is tying your foot to a rock when trying to jump higher. A couple weeks of tutoring makes a difference, but it doesn’t mean your student will get the score they want on the first try. As any process of improvement, academics takes time and hard work. I give homework assignments every week so that active improvement doesn’t begin and end when I walk in and out of the house. Surrender, I think, is something from which many of my clients and students could benefit. There’s almost always another testing period, another application season, another semester to improve your grades.
Do the work, be prepared, do your best, and Surrender the rest.
Read some Watts. I dare you.
“Only by never becoming a thing even when [someone] is a thing can [one] let things be things.”
Zhuang Zi