From Suspicion to Surrender

When I’m in a really good place, I try to relish it because I feel like it means I’m in a glorious resting period—that peace and calm that comes just before I am stretched again by the next storm of my life.

But that’s really just a sugar-coated way of saying that I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop.

And that makes life black and white— either good or bad. And life isn’t like that. It just doesn’t work that way. Life is full of gray area. Life is full of color, too, and to siphon living into black or white is so limiting… so small.

And I don’t want to live like that anymore, where I’m waiting for the next bad thing to happen because—after all—it’s bound to.

That’s not living in the moment. In fact, it’s anything but. It’s like sleeping with one eye open, or with a gun under my pillow.

I end up feeling a little suspicious of every good thing that happens to me, as if I don’t really deserve good things, or as if bad things are my penance for living a good life.

That means I’m just limping through life… or worse—Army-crawling on all fours, under imaginary barbed wire, across imaginary enemy lines.

I make things harder than they have to be, and harder than they actually are, all because I'm trying to stay in control. Always suspicious, always on guard, always considering and calculating who’s going to wrong me next, or what awful thing is going to happen next, or what my next move will be—

Instead of letting go, living in the moment, and standing tall through those moments when life is really hard.

I should note that I’m so much better about living in the moment than I used to be.

I slip up, though. And, still, whenever something deeply wonder-full comes my way, that question hangs in the back of my mind:

Shit. What’s next?

A slight sense of dread, clouding beautiful moments in my life. How ugly… how utterly sad.

The beauty of constant growth is—now that I am aware, I have something pretty specific to work on.

Apparently my current, ongoing mission is to let go of control.

There’s a word for that, ya know. I’ve mentioned it very recently and alluded to just how difficult it is for me to do.

Yup…

Surrender.