SURRENDER + GRASPING

As much as you want to help someone, that person cannot be helped unless they take it upon themselves to accept help and make decisions using their own free will.

Grasping on to the hope that one day someone will see, realize, get it, change, etc. will only create a strain within you because you can’t control someone else’s free will.

It’s one thing to have hope for a loved one, act on the things you have control over, make yourself available to them in case they choose to utilize your offering, and then surrender to that process.

It’s an entirely different thing—a fruitless cause and a waste of energy—to grasp on to hope and to try to force that hope upon someone else’s free will. Doing this renders the grasping person powerless, making their source of happiness and fulfillment dependent on another person’s behavior.

As long as that person doesn’t yield to the grasping person’s hopes, the grasping person will go frantic, trying to control others, until they either crack under the pressure of how unsustainable their behavior is, or until they decide to finally let go and grieve what’s not there. Regardless, letting go will happen eventually… all this is to say that letting go can be made a graceful, conscious choice if that’s what’s desired.

People have choices. I do not have agency over others’ choices. I have influence, but not control.

Knowing this, the thing that makes the most sense for me to do is to love people freely. This can be painful, sometimes, because it means releasing my attachments to others showing up in any particular way. It means grieving the people and dreams I’ve longed for, loved, and lost. It can also be incredibly rewarding, loving freely and letting go, because it means embracing people as already whole. In this sense, I get to enjoy and love the entirety of who a person is.

It’s fulfilling.

Some attachments just make it way harder for people to let go and simply love others, and I try to have compassion for this when I see it.

The act of letting go is easier said and done from an outsiders perspective—a perspective that is free from the very attachments which make it nearly insufferable for some to let go—than it is for people (to let go) who are already entangled in those attachments. This doesn’t mean it’s impossible to stop grasping—sometimes this process simply warrants patience and grace from those who want to show up in loving support of them.

These are themes I’m noticing in my life right now.

And that’s the thing about being human—we’re wired to form very powerful attachments. 

It’s not easy to let go. It’s not easy to watch others grasp and suffer. It’s not easy to accept grief and uncertainty. It’s not easy to love people and then lose them. It’s not easy to feel pain.

However, all of this is an inevitable part of life.

In this regard, I value softness and openness. Those qualities can be cultivated through meditative practices, and they can come greatly in handy when we are faced with situations where we need to let go of control and allow people to be mistake-making people.

I find it beautiful when I get to observe the way that having a loose grip on life positively impacts the people I love most. It helps them to loosen up. It helps to free their hearts from expectations, thusly allowing their experiences in life to be effortlessly full and fluid.

I speak of letting go in this way not to imply that we should deny ourselves—our hopes, attachments, and wishes—and be complacent about the things we’re not okay with.

No, no.

Your hopes, attachments, and wishes all deserve to take up space in life.

They are like sense-guideposts. They can point you towards what you value most in this life.

They are there to be felt, heard, and acted on in balance.

The way to nurture them and maintain a balanced relationship with them, in my experience, is to feel them, act on them in the areas of life that you have control over, and then allow life to continue unfolding after you’ve done all that’s in your power.

Both loving and letting go, to me, mean being vulnerable, transparent, keeping an open heart, and taking actions from an empowered, aligned place.

I hope this clarified my stance on how to find balance between when to let go of control and when to take control.

Now, here’s more on my thought process around letting go:

I’m sure many people can relate to this one experience in particular. You notice certain people that are close to you—whether they be friends or family—trying to control other people that are close to them.

You see the push-pull dynamics all around you—the antics come out during gatherings, parties, even casual conversations over the phone.

“You should do this. Why haven’t you done this? Why aren’t you doing this? Do this. No, do it this way.”

(On that way of communicating: it’s one thing to instruct someone how to do something in an appropriate context, and it’s something completely different to try to micromanage and dictate somebody’s life.)

You see this dynamic play out between someone in particular. Maybe even a few particular people. Siblings, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins. Sometimes friends. Lovers, colleagues, students and teachers, anyone. It could be anyone.

You realize your loved one is digging themselves into a ditch by trying to control what their spouse or child or parent or cousin does. You know they’re only pushing others away by trying to control them.

You try to reason with them, but they’re too shrouded by fear and feverishness to see your point of view with a sound mind. They’re too set on preserving this ephemeral, unnamable thing to loosen their grip and accept reality for what it is. So you take a step back and try again when they cool down.

They swim against the current, so you wait a while for them to float back down your way. You’ll talk to them soon.

You feel a little sad in the meantime, seeing how set on preserving their hopes and expectations they are, so much so that you grieve what got buried in that moment under their impulsive and controlling ways.

You soothe yourself by acknowledging that it’s just their survival instinct, activated in full swing. They’re in preservation mode.

They don’t want to lose what they love and long for, and they make up for this by trying to grasp onto things that have likely already slipped away from them.

You have compassion for them.

You hope they’ll change next time they come back to this issue they keep fighting, instead of surrendering to.

It has hurt you to watch in times past, because you have felt powerless in those situations. All you could do each time was allow them to play out their attachments to these rigid, emotionally charged ideas until their own empty efforts crumble in the palms of their hands.

And when things crumble, you decide you’ll be there for them, still.

You’re ready to meet them in softness when they can finally find that within themselves.

And when it becomes quiet, even for a moment, they’re finally able to hear your reasoning.

And in that very moment, you feel warm. You feel inspired, and like your faith has been externally validated.

You had spent years watching the way they resisted the current of life to the point where their thrashing and yelling and screaming destroyed things, burning bridges, leaving deep scathes in the terrain and pile-trails of ash.

You didn’t learn to surrender to life too easily under those examples.

Eventually, through observation, you learn that what those people think they want might not actually be what they truly want.

It might not be the thing that will bring them the most liberty and power.

As you watch them and learn, you apply these lessons to yourself.

And you come to understand in time, through losing control and feeling grief and pain and experiencing loss, that what you long for is a place, but what you forgot before birth is that you have been stumbling around that very place for your entire life, only the lights were switched off, but eventually you flipped a switch and you can see the room clearly.

You are free.

You have let go, and you remember that you are already in love.

You are not worried. You’re prepared to ride the waves that are yet to come, even though you learned to swim by watching somebody else punch and scream at the ocean for making waves.

Now you pour into the world around you from a wellspring of grace and patience.

It’s one thing to pray for change and surrender to the will of your heart, and it’s another to try and control it.

Just like it’s one thing to wait until the ocean’s tide quells and the water is serene enough for you to learn to swim without getting battered by waves, and it’s another to try and alter its natural state.

Tightening your grip around the hope that somebody else will change will only hurt you and push that person further away. It makes your happiness dependent on another person’s decisions.

It’ll make a person insecure, as if building a foundation on the shifting sand of the external world; uncertain, temporary, changing.

I’ve found that there is an infinitely deep and powerful well of faith, trust, and sovereignty that will catch us even we you find yourself in a perpetually blind stumble. Even if we follow somebody else as they stumble and thrash through the dark, stumbling and thrashing ourselves.

This is something I’ve had to reconcile with within my own family—the grasping—watching others grasp for control while I sat back and helplessly observed all that I couldn’t control.

I grieve the loss of opportunity to learn grace and faith I never got when I was young.

Instead, I choose grace and faith now.

Hopefully I can sit back now and be a warm hearth fire of a friend, or mother, or lover, or human for anyone who could use the support that I wished I had received back then.

I’ve felt the impact of being approached with a grasping attitude, as opposed to an unconditionally loving attitude. 

I’ve also felt the opposite—I know the experience unconditional love.

Still, I’ve observed the way my longing to be seen and accepted arose from believing my innate value could possibly be reduced, by means of others’ behaviors and projections and objectifications, to anything less than whole.

I had come to know what it feels like to be close to someone who is more set on their expectation of how I’m supposed to show up in this world, than they are set on embracing and connecting with who I actually am, and what I’m really navigating in life at any given moment.

And now, thankfully, finally, I have grace for their temporary blindness. Though it lasted a long time, and it was comically inconvenient during my young and tender life.

I feel forgiveness for this now.

And I have advice for anyone who wants it from me, a girl who has experienced life from both ends of this tricky human-experience-spectrum: if you love someone, please avoid making the kinds of mistakes that might slip beneath your awareness if you’re not considerate of the way your unchecked attachments and expectations can impact yourself and those around you. 

Especially young impressionable children.

By allowing your attachments to stifle your connections, you might create rifts where you never meant them to be.

If you love someone, let them be. Accept them. Let go of trying to control them. 

Instead, understand what their limitations are, and understand yours.

Tilt your gaze toward possibilities, and show them where you’re looking towards.

Keep your heart hearth fire warm for them to step in and out of at their own free will. 

Let them be and realize you can’t control them.

Be a well for them to steep in when they’re ready.

Until then, they’ll heal and evolve on their own terms.

When they feel safe, they’ll open. When they feel ready, they’ll change. Accept that you may never see an end to the things you hope will change, and still, walk in prayer as if each moment is a new opening for miracles to unfold.

I think true love and strong faith is indicated by a kind of abundant generosity that is free from attachments to needs. Needs are valid, but they can not always be met and we should learn to accept this in order to free ourselves.

Accepting this, I‘ve learned, means trusting our innate wholeness, giving as much grace as possible to ourselves and those around us, and communicating our heart’s vulnerabilities with people we trust.

True love and faith is boundless, giving, and free for everyone.

It’s brave and open.

It doesn’t take anything personally.

It trusts in God.

It is able to flourish and bloom under even the most entangled of circumstances.

It is able to find pleasure and contentment even in loneliness.

Even in isolation.

Love is here, always.

There is a fresh opening now.