Surrender
Nobody wins all of the time. We are all losers sometimes. Surrender is the choice to acknowledge that loss. Surrender is also the challenging emotion we experience when we make that choice.
Surrender is a loss, but it can also result in a gain. We can employ surrender as a means to escape the rules of a game that he doesn’t want to play any more.
In this episode, stories of the emotion of surrender and its consequences are told by Josie Gibson, Sonja Kresojevic, Jonathan Schwartz, Daniel Gomez Seidel, and Regina Lark.
Full Transcript:
Jonathan Cook:
Welcome to Stories of Emotional Granularity, a podcast that explores the diversity of emotional experience.
The subject of this week’s episode is the emotion of surrender. In its original meaning, surrender is a difficult, but simple act. To surrender is to agree to give a thing over to someone else, to render a thing that has been in our possession to someone else who wants it.
In the context of war, surrender is understood as an acceptance of having lost in the conflict. To surrender in this sense is to stop trying to be in control of the situation, to acknowledge that other people or other forces will direct what happens next, and we won’t. Surrendering requires us to relinquish the centrality of our own will, allowing for others to shape our circumstances.
Surrender is in a sense what we do when we pay attention to our emotions. We abandon the pretense that our logic is in control of our thoughts and actions. Surrender is also what happens when we listen to stories. We surrender our attachment to the facts of literal reality. We suspend our disbelief.
Josie Gibson, reflecting on the nature of emotion, suggested to me that we come to understand emotion by considering the stories we tell about the events in our lives and the feelings those events have provoked within us.
Josie Gibson:
I think an emotion, in some cases an emotion is a rational recap of an experience that we've had that is beyond words, and I think that that's why people sometimes struggle to actually articulate emotions or to distinguish them.
It's only through telling stories that they can kind of surface what it actually is that they're trying to say. We're not very skilled, most people, at actually identifying which emotions we're feeling, but the feeling, the experience, comes way before we ascribe meaning to it.
Jonathan Cook:
We have powerful emotional experiences every day, but those emotions become meaningful when we construct stories around them that connect them with the rest of our lives. Stories are structures we use to organize our experiences in a way that gives them meaning. Josie does something similar with people. She seeks out people who are practiced at making change, and brings them together through the Catalyst Network, a social framework that brings creative workers into contact with each others’ projects, enabling them to form partnerships that combine their efforts.
Josie Gibson:
I am quite grounded in that notion of individual capability and agency, but I was also sort of intuitively drawn to how we do things collectively. What interested me was how the two come together, how the individuals actually catalyze change, because when I was a journalist and in subsequent roles, it was clear that there were very few people that I came across who actually had that ability to kind of catalyze big, resonant change over fairly complex domains. I sat with that for years and I dabbled in the leadership arena with collaborators and then in collective change through the lens of innovation, social innovation, different sorts of social technologies, but they never talk to each other.
Jonathan Cook:
The benefits of collective action are clear. As the old saying advises us, many hands make light work. People are often emotionally resistant to joining collectives, however, because it makes them feel uncomfortable to let go of the narrative of the individual leader reshaping the world through their singular vision and forceful personality.
Nonetheless, every life is full of surrender, even for individuals who like to portray themselves as dominant winners. Elon Musk lost the game of bluff over his purchase of Twitter and was forced to give up a huge amount of money and prestige in the process. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates suffered humiliating divorces from wives who didn’t want to be with them any longer. Richard Branson wanted to build a Virgin Galactic space tourism business, but could only reach the upper atmosphere in his rocket ship. Donald Trump insults his rivals by calling them “losers”, but lost the 2020 election, though he still won’t admit that’s what happened.
Nobody wins all of the time. We are all losers sometimes. Surrender is the choice to acknowledge that loss. Surrender is also the challenging emotion we experience when we make that choice. Josie contemplates the feeling of surrender as a preview of the ultimate loss, of a glimpse of mortality.
Josie Gibson:
I'm not quite sure whether it's surrender, which I define as willful acceptance and yielding to a dominating force or powerful influence, something bigger than us or if it's acceptance. And it's to do with three things that made me glimpse my mortality. So I'm not sure what. What to call it, so I just called it surrender.
I thought about my life and the role of fear, and it wasn't quite the right word that I was looking for because I was thinking about life changing experiences that come out of things that people would perceive to be negative. We've had these major bushfires in Australia the last few years, particularly bad ones in 2019 and 2020, just before the pandemic hit. Talking to people who work in emergency services, they often talk about how people get changed through going through crises and those kinds of shattering experiences. I thought that's interesting, because I've had a pretty blessed, lucky life, but I have lived my life. So, I have had a couple of close shaves.
Jonathan Cook:
Josie refers to surrender as a negative experience, and it clearly is. Surrender negates the illusion of control. Surrender negates the implausible story that we are the captains of our own ships.
Josie Gibson:
When I was a rookie reporter, I literally had only been working for months and I was sent out to the bush to do these stories driving this big car. I'd only had my driver's license for less than twelve months, and I'm driving this big old, it was the 80s, so a big old tank station wagon, went out bush, did stories. I loved getting out there on the river and interviewing people and stuff, and then hit a rainstorm as I was coming back.
I'd been out driving for hours on my own, and I passed through this town, which was the second town before I got home, and it was late in the day, and I came around a bit and the road was slick with rain and so at seventeen or eighteen, maybe, I came round the bend and there was a car stopped and and it didn't have brake lights. So, by the time I saw it, all I could do was lock the brakes. Of course, being a big old tank on a slick road with a drop off on one side, I just lost control. It was that feeling of well, oh shit, I have no control, I literally have no control. What do I do? What do I do? This motorcyclist was coming towards me, so I tried to avoid hitting the car without going over the edge of the road. I clipped the car. The car hit the oncoming motorcyclist. It all happened in slow motion, just like they say in the movies. This guy sort of went tumbling over and landed on the road.
I managed to kind of slow the fish tail of this and got out of the car and people were running up and my first thought was, 'Oh, my God, the camera', because I had the work camera, this big pack and it was on the road, but it was okay. I was in shock, obviously, and people came and were comforting me. The motorcyclist, fortunately, was okay, just a bit of collateral damage, which I'm still so sorry for, but I thought that's it. My career as a journalist is over, I'm going to have to ring my boss and tell him I've I've smashed the work car on my first big trip. That's it. My life is over before it's even begun.
Of course, they wanted to know I was okay. They took care of everything. It was fine. I went on to work with them for years and I was so grateful to them, but it was such an important kind of inflection point for me, because I realized I had no control over these these elements, these manmade elements and much else. So, my behavior not just driving the car, but around a whole bunch of other things, shifted dramatically after that. I couldn't even put words to it until years later. I just wasn't mature enough to actually kind of reflect about it. I just know that it really changed my life.
Jonathan Cook:
Josie’s bold choice to drive a big old car out into the Australian bush as a young reporter is an apt metaphor for the illusion of control that often precedes an unwilling surrender. A car is a machine designed to create and maintain the belief that riding in a massive machine at high speeds is a perfectly safe thing to do. Cars are filled with control panels with knobs, buttons, wheels, and pedals that invite us to take charge. A little rain on the road is enough to destroy that control, however.
In Josie’s experience as a young journalist, the emotion of surrender is what she felt after control was taken away. The multi-vehicle accident didn’t just smash her car. It also wrecked her immature confidence. Her career wasn’t over, of course. She could recover. She was compelled to give up the certainty that she could move through a chaotic world without being touched by it.
Josie has experienced a succession of such surrenders. Another came as she found herself caught in a rip current, being pulled out to sea.
Josie Gibson:
I was at a business conference maybe ten or fifteen years ago up on the Gold Coast in Queensland, beautiful beaches. I love the beach. I grew up on the water. I'm not a bad swimmer. I snuck out of the business conference because, well, you've been at business conferences, right? I could hear the beach and thought, I've just got to have one swim before we go. They're beautiful beaches, big pounding surf, and this day was really pounding. I was sitting with a colleague on these golden sands and just really loving it, and then I saw people out there and I thought, okay, I'll go and have a swim. I'll swim through the pounding waves, get out there a bit, between the flags like a good Aussie girl, get away from the turbulence out there.
Of course, there was a rip and I swam out and it just got more and more turbulent, and there were people further out than me, and I started to get a bit tired because, I thought, oh no, this is not a good sign, because the waves were coming, but it was like being caught in the tumble dryer. I'm a fit swimmer, but I was thinking, you know, subconsciously, oh, what do you do in a rip again? I saw on the shore there are a couple of people, refugees from the business conference, an English couple. They were standing there watching what was happening because by that point, one of the surf lifesavers had grabbed his surf ski and was jumping through the waves pretty urgently. I remembered that you got to put your arm up out of the waves. I'm trying to signal to this couple on the shore I'm in trouble. That's the universal. I can't keep going much longer. I'm running out of battery.
Two things happened. They waved back at me like 'Hi!’ The surf lifesaver paddled right by me out to get the couple who were obviously in bigger distress. I literally had about two percent capacity left to keep my head above water. I was being pounded by these huge waves. I thought, I just stopped. I thought, I have nothing left. This is it. I cannot keep going. I'm just going to have to let go, and then the rip picked me up and took me right down the beach and took me into shore, and I crawled onto the shore because I had nothing left. I stood up, and my legs were really wobbly, and I walked back up the beach, because it was quite a ways down to this English couple, and they were watching what was happening with the surf lifesaver, with this couple who are in trouble. They turned to me and said, 'Did you see that? It's just like Bondi Rescue.'
I thought, I've had a brush with death. I just had to laugh almost hysterically, and then I went and sat down and then went back to the conference and told my boss, and he got very angry. But it was that I just have to surrender to this. I have nothing left physically. I can't. This is it. I've completely misjudged. I cannot control any of this.
Jonathan Cook:
Josie was two percent of her capacity away from death. The beach is a beautiful place we go to have fun at the water’s edge, but the water Josie entered was the largest ocean on Earth. Its power was more than she could handle.
It’s easy to think of fighting the waves when you’re not in them. When they’re beating at you, and the shore is getting farther and farther away, it’s another matter. Surrender to death is something we’ll all have to do, eventually. We never know when that moment will come, though, and so it’s tempting to live as if it isn’t real, as if death is something that only happens to other people.
Josie made her surrender to death, but she didn’t drown that day. Her story reminds us that the emotion of surrender is distinct from surrender as an action.
Just one day before I spoke with her, Josie had another crisis that brought her to the point of surrender. This time, she experienced an earthquake while with her husband, at home, in Melbourne.
Josie Gibson:
I was having a conversation with somebody who lives just out of town, and everything started shaking. We have tremors here a lot. What people don't realize is that there is a lot of seismic activity in Australia, not many earthquakes, but when they do have a big one, they have caused quite a bit of damage. I think there was one in Adelaide where I grew up in the Fifties, Newcastle in '89, but they're very, very rare. This started, everything started shaking. This bloke on the other end of the call said, I think it's an earthquake. I said, go get your family, and make sure they're safe. Then my husband came running in, and the only thing I could think of was, oh, we have to get under the table. I have friends who live in Tokyo and they put me through their earthquake drill once when I was visiting, crawled under the table and put the metal fruit bowl on their heads, which sounds really stupid, but it's just funny how that stuff just pops into your mind. I was that case of everything happening, and time still, time stealing, it slowed to the point of slow motion. We rushed down, and it was probably only fifteen seconds or so of this really, really violent shaking. I thought, that's it. You know, you have visions of the earth opening up and whole buildings falling in. I thought it'll be what it'll be. All I know is right now, in this tiny moment, this is all we can do. We just have to surrender to these bigger forces. We can't do anything about it.
I think that you wouldn't seek out experiences like that unless you had some sort of personality disorder and had a particular liking for extreme behaviors, which I know some people do. So for me, it's the the crossing the line into that territory of roiling fear, that anxiety, all the stuff that comes up when we're under duress, that makes us who we are. You can't do anything about all of that stuff that comes up except look at it and kind of reintegrate it, I think, and learn some lessons from it.
Jonathan Cook:
In ordinary, day-to-day life, we experience the Earth as a solid. This, as with so many of the other reassuring thoughts we like to hold, is an illusion. Earth is a molten planet, scorching hot, and in motion underneath our feet. We live within a thin viable membrane on its surface, the biosphere, but the roiling interior cracks apart this crust from time to time. It shakes us. It kills us, and we never know when it’s going to happen.
Nothing we do can stop these kinds of events. We can beg for more time, but to no avail. If we survive, it’s not because we’re virtuous. It’s just dumb luck, and that luck is temporary.
Not all shakeups have to do with our planet’s tectonic plates, of course. Sonja Kresojevic was living in Brooklyn with her two children, in what seemed like a stable romantic relationship. We love to believe, in the more tranquil moments of our lives, that we’ve got it all figured out, that we’re solid, but as with the physical world we live upon, the calm surface of our relationships conceals a turbulent interior that can shake apart everything we hold dear.
So it was that in Sonja’s life, something had to give. Her moment of surrender came, as with Josie’s with the ground literally giving way beneath her feet, but at a scale much more personal than an earthquake. The edge of a cliff gave way, and Sonja fell.
Sonja Kresojevic:
I just knew that I had enough and that I couldn't cope with, you know, being a mother and having to be there for my daughter, especially for my son as well, and take care of myself and do some work that I believe in. It's very demanding and something had to give. And, you know, being a single mom, it was easier to say no to a job than to my kids, of course. But I thought, you know, if I take a couple of months off, I will go back to something in a different company, a different role. It turned out that the change that I needed was much deeper and much more profound.
The whole life in Brooklyn had just fallen apart completely, and I think those external circumstances, when things in your life that you were hoping will happen in a relationship ending, my son was bullied at school and then there's a kind of cherry on top: I go to Portugal to a conference and fall off the cliff.
I didn't know how I survived. I think to this day, it's one of those mysteries that I just don't understand. I ended up really bruised all over and with a broken shoulder. But, I think those moments when life is giving you feedback, that's because you were still holding on to something inside of you, something that you didn't want to let go, and it's the story that you don't want to release, right?
Really, I wasn't sure that I wanted to stay in New York or not. But you make it about the external set of circumstances because you inside are still fighting something. You still don't want to let go. You still want to know that that narrative, slightly different, is still going to succeed and that falling off the cliff was probably the best thing that happened, because it was that very loud sign that you just can't ignore anymore. You know, I was kind of, okay, fine, you know, don't push me one more time. I will pay attention.
Jonathan Cook:
Sonja perceived her accident as a metaphorical representation of the perilous condition of her life in general. She felt as if she had been living too close to the edge, and that a fall from her comfortable perch had become inevitable. She had seen the signs of a crumbling life accumulating for a while. Her literal fall was just the last shake she needed to convince her that she needed to let go of a situation that wasn’t viable any longer.
It was as if she had been hanging on to the edge of a cliff before she ever made that trip to Portugal. She was exhausted from the effort of clinging on. The emotional release of surrender was for her experienced in a figurative letting go.
Sonja Kresojevic:
I needed to let go of whatever I was holding on, but there was fear that was driving that. I was, you know, I didn't want to feel uncomfortable. I wanted to get quickly to the other side and feel good and happy and. You know, like I found what I was looking for. You know, I was still searching. And I think this journey changes when you start the search and you stop to believe that there is an end to something, because searching for me is still part of the old narrative, part of the system that we belong to.
So, whether you are climbing the top in the corporate world or still searching for your purpose or meaning, as long as you are validating that based on external circumstances and not willing to, you know, really fall deeply into and face your fear and the darker side of you. And I think this was that moment of, okay, hey, now this journey is actually about something else and needs to look a bit different. And I need to create more space and I need to stop holding on to whatever idea I had of life, success, work, love. The last couple of years were really about letting go of all of that.
I think it was after that fall that I started to face much more on a much deeper level the burdens that have been placed on me that were not mine to carry.
Jonathan Cook:
Surrender is a frightening thing. It’s not a casual choice. It involves the feeling of letting go of our grip on the people, things, and systems that make us feel safe, without any certainty about what happens next. When we experience the emotion of surrender, we lose the ability to control our descent.
The strange thing is the choice of surrender can sometimes help us. Sometimes, the desperate passion with which we hold on to the scraps of a crumbling life can twist us into distorted postures that cause us more pain than we experience once we let go. Sometimes, only after releasing our attachment to life as it is can we begin the work of rebuilding life as something closer to what we would like it to be.
So it was for Jonathan Schwartz, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, then lost his career and his marriage in the financial collapse of 2008.
Jonathan Schwartz:
Usually when people ask me about myself or my story, I usually start in 2008. I ended up getting divorced. I was working in the mortgage industry. I was living in Baltimore. I owned a home and there was a financial collapse. So, when I got divorced, I put all my things into storage. I sold my home and I started traveling.
Once I started traveling, I went to Mexico and then I ended up in Belize for a month and then Guatemala. When I got to Guatemala, I met a guy that was integral moment in my life because I ended up meeting one of my future partners in the cannabis industry there in Guatemala.
They went back to Cartagena. I stayed in a small fishing village on the coast, the Caribbean coast of Colombia, and about a month later, I had I had rented a hotel, a small hotel on the beach with a partner who I met there.
One of the people who was staying with me, one of my guests, had some people volunteering from around the world mentioned ayahuasca or yage, I thought it would be great idea to invite a shaman over and do a ceremony with some of the foreigners who were staying with me.
Jonathan Cook:
Ayahuasca is a traditional medicine that’s made from the combination of two plants found growing wild in South America. It’s long been used in ceremonies that involve the purposeful pursuit of mystical visions. Ayahuasca produces vivid hallucinations, but it also typically results in extreme nausea, leading the people who use it to suffer intense vomiting.
Vomiting doesn’t feel good, but it is another powerful metaphor for the emotion of surrender. We vomit when there’s something within us that poses a danger to us, making feel unwell. Nausea gathers as a signal of the problem, and yet, many people fear vomiting so much that they resist it, trying to diminish the feeling of nausea rather than paying attention to its warning.
Jonathan Schwartz teaches that the purging that takes place within ayahuasca ceremonies is an expression of a surrender, not just of control over the gastro-intestinal tract, but also of the toxic beliefs and feelings that can lead us to endure a sort of ongoing low-level emotional nausea.
Jonathan Schwartz:
I thought that I would have a future with this plant medicine, this ayahuasca, the yage and shamanism and ceremonies, and I did. It took me a very long, many years of study and practice and ceremonies and some time, a lot of years with the medicine, some years away from the medicine. But when I say to myself, I mean this ayahuasca just is a sacrament.
It actually just chemically makes your brain feel better. So you're already you're already feeling better. Also, part of the process is a physical and emotional purge what that does is helps you to release emotions usually that you're holding onto that are no longer serving you. So, you’re letting go of that failure, of that loss of relationship or something, whatever might happen in the past, helps you really focus on the present moment and shows you how to move forward, because you have no choice and then you just want to take the best road forward, the best road for you and your family, how you're going to be healthy, how you're going to be happy. So it actually shows you what to do to be better, to be healthier, to feel better, to be happier. It also showed me so much of what didn't matter, like physical things. I mean, once you continue down a spiritual path, you have to learn detachment to everything really, as as if you get attached to money or anything in this physical world.
It's like forgiveness, you know, It's like when somebody does harms you, it hurts you. You're angry and you can if you stay mad at them forever. They don't even know anymore. Sometimes they care. Some people do care. But the only one that really is in pain is the one that's holding on to the anger. So that's why it's so important to forgive others whether you want to continue relationship with or not. But forgiveness is so important because it's a form of letting go. With ayahuasca, what happens is you take the medicine and it has an intelligence. It has an energy, a spirit on its own. You take the medicine and it starts to work in your body. And sometimes it will. It needs to physically cleanse you because we have so many toxins and everybody needs to prepare the body for what's to come. The information for the visions, for the healing, the emotional, the spiritual. And so you're just literally physically releasing bile and things in your body that that aren't doing you any good. And then it puts you into a psychedelic trip. And the psychedelic trip is introspective. It shows you what's on your subconscious mind, what's in the unconscious. So it starts to show you visions.
A lot of it is about what's going on in your life. It could be relationships that you have. It could be things that happened in your past. Sometimes it will show you past lives. That's not this conversation, past lives of your ancestors or the future. But often in this physical world, in this physical life, the relationships that you have, maybe it's a business partner. Or maybe it's. It's an old girlfriend and you just can't forgive yourself about how you treated her or something like that. It will show you the situation and it starts to come up. And the more you can hold on to handle it, the more it will show you. But it will get to a point where you just can't take it anymore, and the best thing to do is just physically vomit.
You're actually, if you're conscious and you're focused, you can let go of that emotion and say, I don't need that anymore. I learned from that situation what I needed to learn. Thank you. And you move on. You’re literally just vomiting, leaving it there and walking and moving on like you don't have it. It's no longer within you. It's something that you've moved on from.
Jonathan Cook:
When Jonathan Schwartz surrenders himself to ayahuasca, he allows it to take control of both his body and his mind. This surrender allows him to grant himself the permission to let go of his mental attachments, the preoccupations that have been shaping his life.
This kind of loss isn’t like the loss of a game. It’s more like like the loss of a burden, or the loss of a tether. Jonathan uses surrender as an opportunity to escape the rules of a game that he doesn’t want to play any more.
Daniel Gomez Seidel is also pursuing this sort of surrender. I met him a few years ago at a gathering of business professionals in Manhattan. In the apartment where we came together, dancers were performing, computer scientists were getting drunk, and financial consultants were talking about following in the example of Jonathan Schwartz, going on ayahuasca retreats. Daniel didn’t know it then, but he would soon surrender his life in New York City, and begin a journey of many questions, but few certain answers.
Daniel Gomez Seidel:
My profession is in strategy, which is so focused on the future, you know, what's going to go down, how forces are interacting, what opportunity spaces are going to open and which ones are going to close.
I've been on a journey of surrender. It has not been charted according to any specific set of guidelines or plans like most of my life has been. I try to remember. I think the last time we spoke I was in Guatemala and it was the very beginning of this journey where my life had taken some twists and turns. The infrastructure upon which my life had been built, this finally fell apart. With that gap, there was a lot of room to learn, to grow into, to reprosper, to reblossom. You know, I thought there's no better time than this to actually have an opportunity to invest, and been going in a deep inner journey.
So, I have been nomadic for essentially the better, a little bit more than a year. I have been really, really trying to get to the bone of what feels aligned and purposeful at every step that I take. What does integrity look like in my life, in my work, in my word, in my action, my practice, and my inaction?
Jonathan Cook:
As Daniel begins talking about his own surrender, he brings up a defining aspect of the emotion: An experience of surrender cannot be planned by the person who undergoes it.
Surrender is in this sense the opposite of strategy. Strategy is thoroughly infused with the presumption of control. Surrender abandons strategic plans for controlling the future and allows for something else to be in charge. Taking a substance like ayahuasca is a decision to stop making decisions, and instead allow the mind to be directed by a biochemical cascade triggered by an outside agent.
Psychoactive drugs are one pathway to such an experience of mental surrender, but they aren’t necessary for it. For those seeking transcendence, drumming, dance, meditation, and peaceful contemplation are some alternatives.
Daniel has chosen the path of nomadism, surrendering the idea of a permanent home for the shelter that he finds in whatever place he happens to find himself in.
Daniel Gomez Seidel:
So I'm Colombian, and a lot of my life has been framed by the opportunities, but also the limitations of the immigrant journey in America. I moved for school to see and meet the world in a larger diversity. Attached to that. Idea attached to that goal were some pretty specific requirements. You know, you had to excel in a certain kind of discipline. You have to submit a certain amount of paperwork in a certain amount of time. In order to access the quote, freedom, freedom of creative impulse, freedom of social navigation, freedom of self-expression. I had to check these boxes. So surrender was happening inside.
Shortly after that, I learned that my mother had been diagnosed with a late stage of cancer. I'm an only child. We have a very close relationship. All of a sudden these external factors that were exogenous to my ability to shape destiny, to my liking, to my willpower, my drive, just kind of showed up and said no, we're going to take things for a different turn. I remember when hearing the news from my mother, one of the first thing I did, I was decided to go on a walk.
The process of death, or accompanying the process of somebody who's close to dying, is the highest opportunity for sadhana, spiritual practice. But what does that mean? It means that you have the opportunity every day to surrender to what is. And that's where the word surrender comes into play it for me. It's different from this perception or this protagonism that you have on wielding your life to your own, you know, to your own desires, to your own fantasies about how it's going to take shape. But then there's also the path of surrendering to the present moment and to what is, and there's a certain kind of sweetness in that. There's a certain kind of relief.
I think I was very future oriented, goal oriented, which made, I think, the present moment feel unreal. It was incomplete. It was always there, always something to look forward to, always something better to improve, to evolve. What we are in control of is to let go, to let go of the story.
Jonathan Cook:
It’s interesting to me that both Daniel and Jonathan began working in finance, a discipline that thrives on precision and predictability. The emotion of surrender is what we feel when we allow that discipline to slip through our grasp, allowing our lives to be guided more by the way things are than what we want things to be.
There is often a moral judgment made against those who refuse even to try to shape reality according to their will. They’re accused of laziness, of being quitters. Perseverance is promoted as a path to success, with the presumption that success is always a good idea.
We are instructed to never give up, never give in. Winners never quit, and quitters never win.
On the other hand, a popular aphorism advises us that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, while expecting different results.
Simon Sinek tells his followers, “Don't quit. Never give up trying to build the world you can see, even if others can't see it. Listen to your drum and your drum only. It's the one that makes the sweetest sound.”
Does everyone’s drum actually make the sweetest sound, though? Is it really a good idea to keep on following your vision, even when the rest of the world has no clue what you’re seeing, as if you’re hallucinating? The stubborn refusal to admit the possibility of being mistaken may feel powerful in the moment, but its power is delusion more often than not.
Fans of hustle culture tell us to double down when our efforts seem to go wrong, but then, these are the same people who told us to buy Bitcoin even as it was crashing, certain that its rapid decline in value was just a temporary dip.
W.C. Fields gave this advice, which is as practical as it is comedic: “If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no point in being a damn fool about it.”
Of course ability and effort play a role in success, but quantitative research demonstrates that dumb luck is the dominant factor in differentiating between who succeeds and who fails.
In 2018, for example Alessandro Pluchino, Alessio Emanuele Biondo, and Andrea Rapisarda demonstrated that random chance, rather than effort or ability, was the best explanation for professional success. They wrote, “if it is true that some degree of talent is necessary to be successful in life, almost never the most talented people reach the highest peaks of success, being overtaken by averagely talented but sensibly luckier individuals.” Other research has shown that the students who attend prestigious Ivy League universities are not the most academically talented, but those who had the luck to be born into wealthy families.
Much of life is a pure gamble, with the players superstitiously believing that they can master the game through their refusal to quit their ritualized routines. One physical manifestation of this refusal to admit defeat is hoarding, the accumulation of assets without the ability to integrate them into a coherent life.
Regina Lark is an organization consultant. She specializes in helping her clients confront the chaos of their cluttered lives by finding a way to let it all go.
Regina Lark:
I have a company. I'm a professional organizer. I have a declutter and organize company, and we hear that a lot: ‘I'm just lazy.’ Like, well. There's probably some deeper underlying reasons why you're not able to activate. Let's explore those. How do you feel about the task at hand? What does the task at hand bring up for you that you've just shut the door on and go, ‘I'm lazy, I can't do it.’
I'll come across something that a friend had given me, and I'll have something in my heart about it, but if I'm kind of done with it. I'll let it go. People who call people like me have a real hard time letting it go.
Jonathan Cook:
The sensitivity in Regina’s work comes from recognizing that when people hold on to things, they’re also holding on to versions of themselves that they associate with those things.
Regina Lark:
It absolutely depends on the circumstances of the transition. If it's not a good divorce, if it's, if you're an older adult and you're downsizing now into an assisted living community, people see that as kind of the end of the road. So it just keeps emotion on top of emotion on top of emotion. What I'm tasked with is helping them let go of that, which they have a lot of stories about. Which they believe truly that they love, and which they truly believe they're going to need someday. What I have discovered is that a lot of what's going on there is the holding on and having and being challenged by letting it go, holding on, can't let it go.
I think there's a lot of fear of letting go because of the perception of a catastrophized outcome. They're also holding on to the stuff from the past. So one guy said, Regina, if I let go of all of my concert t-shirts, and he had Creedence, Aerosmith, he had them all from the 60s, If I let go. He was 300. We counted. ‘If I let go of all my concert t-shirts,’ he said, ‘How will anybody know I used to be cool? I'm afraid people won't know I used to be cool.’ So what I see is that the holding onto the future, what they may need someday into the past, who they believe they used to be.
Jonathan Cook:
Surrender isn’t just a struggle for Regina’s clients. She experiences barriers to surrender the items in her own home and their associations in her own mind.
Regina Lark:
I had a floor to ceiling doctorate library. Yes, I read every book. Yes, they were organized by genre. I had had a beautiful library and the books were brought in for me to work on my dissertation. I was also teaching a lot of history and women's studies courses. So, the books were there to dissertation and to teach, and when those two parts of my professional life ended, I finished the dissertation and I moved from being an adjunct faculty to an administrator, the books only gained in value. They didn't diminish in value, because I had a perception of what you thought about me when you walked into my home office. A smart person must live here. Wow. Did you read all those books? I was afraid of letting go of that ideal that I had set up for myself. That was all my making. No one really had to plant that seed.
Jonathan Cook:
Regina Lark didn’t want to let her books go, even though she didn’t really need then, because those books served as a visual symbol of her identity as an academic. As long as she had the books, she felt that she was still a member of academia, even after her dissertation was complete. The surrender of those books meant letting go of that part of her life, but it also enabled her to move forward into new work and a new vision of herself.
In just such a spirit of surrender, I am announcing that with this episode, we have reached the end of the first season of the podcast Stories of Emotional Granularity. After two months’ worth of weekly episodes, I’m going to take a few weeks to take stock, get organized, and do more interviews about yet more emotions.
It won’t be long before the second season of Stories of Emotional Granularity starts. New episodes will be coming your way again in just a few weeks from now, with the summer solstice, a new season in a new season.
Until then, thank you for listening.