ode to surrender — Junaid Bhatti

The ego is strong, the driver of the human condition. There’s a pull from the ego to control, to take life captive, to pick and choose it all. But this is not the way. The universe gives us examples built into actuality, and following them can bring a lot of peace to our lives. Instead of controlling, surrender.

I. Forces against the body

Surrender is how we meet the strongest forces.

1.1

The current of the ocean is much stronger than the human body. A helpless surfer holds his breath in stinging anticipation for the seizing moment he has a chance to breathe. Even ships aren’t spared – the 19th-century New England whaling voyages were often cut short due to the unforgiving, merciless storms. A hurricane, a tsunami, wipe out cities with no chance of retaliation. Humans are left to ponder the middle ground between admiration and resentment towards such a formidably beautiful force.

1.2

The air that we breathe, the very gas that lets us experience life, is also stronger than the human body. Venture too deep in the ocean and the pressure crushes your lungs. Go too high in the air and the atmosphere reminds you that you don’t belong there. Air circumscribes a boundary for us as if we were its children, fenced in the backyard. The “Santa Ana Winds,” tornadoes, and wildfires whistle and crack on their own timing, and all we can do is watch.

1.3

The sun powers everything we know. Wake up tomorrow morning, sit in the sun and do nothing but let it soak into every pore and surface on your body, and absorb the invigorating warmth that we are blessed to feel. Think for an extra second about how daylight would not exist without the sun, that life would not exist. Is it not so interesting that, contrastingly, too much sun can harm you? No wonder humans once thought the Sun was God.

II. Conditions of existence

The ocean and the air can at least be fled. Some forces cannot be resisted at all; they are not around us but inside everything.

2.1

Jump, there is a guarantee you will fall back down. You can’t fight gravity. You can’t fight the fundamental truths of our livable reality. We can harness gravity as a tool of movement, yet must surrender to its indelible qualities. There’s no escape from $F_{g} = mg$ – the force that pins us to the ground. It holds us down to Earth, regulates (1.1) and (1.2), and organizes the energy radiated from the Sun. There’s nothing to do about gravity other than accept it as the physical makeup of our reality. The fall is guaranteed, but the jump is yours.

2.2

Time is ever fleeting. The second you try to stop time it flees. Moments can never be kept, and that’s scary. You can’t linger in a moment for more than the moment itself, otherwise it leaves you behind. You must rely on the raw senses as they come and go. But accepting the inevitable passing of time is liberating. You can be present, you can enjoy the ephemeral.

2.3

A human with an active reading window throughout their life might manage a few hundred books. The average library contains well into the ten-thousands. Knowledge is an unbelievably dense set. It resembles $\mathbb{R}$ , the set of real numbers. There’s a theorem in math called the density of $\mathbb{Q}$ in $\mathbb{R}$ , which says that in between any two numbers $x,y \in \mathbb{R}$ where $x < y$ there exists infinitely many rational numbers in between them. You can always find some number in between two others. You feel that you’ve managed to close the gap, yet there are still infinitely many more things to learn. Similarly, knowledge is like $\mathbb{R}$ , infinite, uncountable, unbounded. The first step to learning is knowing that you know nothing.

2.4

The only guarantee in life is death. We run and hide from it, and we try and fill our days with anything that feels like living. Our entire life is a timeline bounded by birth and death, with an unknowable void that fills the rest. It’s unsettling to think about, is it all black, does reincarnation exist, heaven or hell? There is no answer to this question. Being scared of death is not a productive use of anxiety (which differs from the act of avoiding death, which we should practice at all times). There’s a lot of peace to come with accepting that all you can do is spend your life – which Seneca says is not actually short, just poorly spent – chasing what you care about and value, nothing more.

III. The lives we construct

We accept reality because we have no choice. The harder surrender is to things we believe we made, and the choices we make day to day.

3.1

For some reason, we understand very intuitively that there are lots of processes built into our reality that we can’t control – weather, time, other people – but we try so very hard to control the other aspects of our life. I understand that it’s different, some are fundamental truths, or uncontrollable, and the ones we try to control are manmade. But what was built by billions of hands belongs to no one person, any more than the weather or ocean does. So it makes sense to apply the same logic to the things we did create, and I think that would solve a lot of problems.

3.2

Humanity is driven by control. People fight for power over politics, money, influence, etc. Everything is seen as win or lose, it’s binary. Comparison is the fuel of the economy and global innovation. This has its pros, but how can we live when we try to assert control over every aspect of our lives. How can I ensure I get this job, or this house, or xyz. It’s a bit daunting to stress over these social constructs.

3.3

Humanity is also driven by control over the immaterial, and at the very bottom of it all, it comes down to love. We want to be loved, seen, appreciated. Life becomes a question of how we can place ourselves into the best situation. How to make this person my friend, how to make this person my partner. We seem to forcibly chase situations/environments that we think we want. The need for social recognition is the peak of this problem. We’re all guilty of it.

3.4

Society and individuals seem to care a lot about taste these days. You can tell apart those who are free thinkers and those constrained by their own categorization of what is a “good” and “bad” thought. They consume media and build an opinion based on what might make them look smart or appeal to the crowd they reside in. It’s a complete redirection from raw senses and experience to fugazing taste. Experience life from first principles. Break it down to what your senses actually tell you, and let the opinion come last, if it comes at all. Your taste becomes your own.

IV. Forces within us

What does it look like to let go?

4.1

Do you know that feeling when you have conversation with someone new, or maybe you finally broke the surface-level topics with that person you were never too close to, and then it just clicks? Something about the chemistry between you both, the shared experience, or maybe the stark opposite lives you’ve lived, but you know this is someone you connect to and want to share more time with. Did you force that connection, or did you just know?

How about that one class you took in college, the life-changing novel you read, the summer hobby that has absolutely engulfed your free time. Energy is the currency of the universe. It exists everywhere, in everything, and everyone. Just like gravity is the force of the Earth, energy is an invisible force pushing and pulling you from what belongs. Physics says nothing changes direction without a force, well, neither do we. Those are real signs of what to pursue; nothing told you to love it except how it made you feel. Love what you love, and let whoever is drawn to it come.

4.2

Think about creativity. The last time you were excited to create, did you force the idea? You can only cultivate an environment to organically think out ideas. Try to power through the thinking process and nothing of substance comes out. Try to predict your next thought, try to come up with a creative project on the spot – you can’t. I haven’t written long-form in a while, and part of that is because I haven’t had a gut feeling for something to write about. Could I have squeezed out some piece, probably. Would it have felt authentic, meaningful, and a true representation of where my head was, probably not. Creativity is not something you can control, but something that you nurture.

The greatest work you produce, did you foresee the outcome and plan the grand execution before it was completed? I would guess not. The beauty came from the process, from following instinct and inspiration.

4.3

Note though, surrender is not giving up. You still choose how you treat people, where your time and attention go. You don’t get to choose the outcome. Put in as much work and effort from your side, and let go of results. Attachment to the outcome leads to resentment of the process. Rid yourself of the belief that some amount of work proportionally means you deserve some amount of results.

4.4

I think a lot of dissatisfaction comes from a deep and inherited belief that the present should be different from how it is. “I should have x job, I should be at y college, I should have z money.” What if you accepted the moment as where you should be? Islam directly translates to surrender, and a teaching that’s really impacted my life is how surrendering to the present is not only divine belief that you are where you should be, but make it spiritual – you are accepting satisfaction with what is, and you are completely focused on the now. Salam means peace, and it shares the same root as Islam, s-l-m. Surrender and peace go together. That is no coincidence. Most of our turmoil comes from trying to predict the future, and we are let down when it doesn’t go exactly how we wanted.

Conclusion

Counterintuitively, surrendering is not a loss of agency, but actually a gain. Instead of belonging to a false reality of prediction and guesswork, you begin to live presently where you should’ve been all along. You rely on the senses to direct you physically, intuition to guide you mentally, and spirituality to steer you as a being. Go back to the start (1.1), the ocean, the sun, time, other people, none of it was ever yours. You still work, still choose, still care, you just stop needing them to turn out a certain way to be at peace. Rid your mind of arrogance and entitlement to control, and be humble to the world.

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