Surrender

Something Neha Sinha said to me while recounting how she got through a difficult time, when her father was in the hospital in Delhi, sticks with me:

“In these kinds of difficult situations which are physically and mentally challenging … you look at a tree, and it restores you. It kind of makes you feel that you might have strength that you didn’t know about.”

For Sinha, that tree is the Semal. Then she asked me if I had a tree of my own.

I didn’t have an answer when she asked me, but I do have a North Star—the thing that gets me up in the morning and the thing I think about at night.

I wish I could tell you that holding on to the vision of that North Star is easy.

What I have started doing is surrendering.

Surrendering is not giving up. It doesn’t mean downgrading your effort or your intentions.

In my case, it is the opposite: as I realize how little control I truly have over the outcome, the more effort and love I seem to give.

Surrendering is the ability to have dreams and desires and still keep moving, even if things aren’t unfolding. You surrender the outcome to the care of the universe, or to the care of nature.

It takes a lot of faith and strength to sit with that.

Some of us have to exhaust ourselves before we can truly see that we can’t control the outcome anyway, no matter how perfectly we try or how perfect we think we have to be.

In these moments, I remember what I have survived and what I am capable of.

Trees stand in the same place for decades, hundreds, or thousands of years. They survive storms, floods, fires, earthquakes, and disease. Perhaps they can teach us something about what we are all made of.

How does a tree remain steadfast through all of that?

There’s no magic pill. You may reach a point where the pain is so unbearable that you have no choice but to offer it up to the universe and say, “I trust something far greater is on the way.”

Mike

Image Credit: A Canary Island Date Palm (Phoenix canariensis) located in Centennial Park, Sydney. Photo by Mike DiGirolamo