Surrender to uncertainty
One of life’s biggest lessons, if we can master it, is being comfortable with the uncomfortable. When we can surrender to uncertainty, we allow ourselves the opportunity to truly enjoy life.
Different religions and spiritual practices express this slightly differently, but the message is often: Surrender and trust in god/the universe. When I was younger, I resisted this saying. In my essay application to the International Baccalaureate program, I started with this statement:
“Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get.”-- Forrest Gump. I disagree with this statement. Life is what we set out to do and achieve, and we are in charge of our own destinies.
Talk about confidence and being a control freak! I still try to control a lot, but experience and time has taught me that the greatest things in life often come from resisting the urge to control everything. To not only live with uncertainty, but actually be comfortable and revel in it.
In life, we are all looking for security in certainty. We all want money and wealth because it’s a sort of security; it “guarantees'' that our basic needs will be taken care of, and we can then do whatever we want. And, when it comes to relationships, many of us want some sort of guarantee that we are with the right person, and that it will be forever. Corporate jobs give us a false sense of security. We have a pay cheque every month and a job for the foreseeable near future.
But the irony is, all of these things give us a false sense of security. Money and wealth can buy us many things, but no amount can ever guarantee us true contentment with our lives. In relationships, even when we are fortunate enough to find a loving partner, there is no guarantee you or your partner won’t get hit by a bus tomorrow, have a terminal illness or something else completely unforeseen. (This is not even discussing other things that could lead to the end of a relationship such as cheating, or other factors.) In a corporate job, we actually have no visibility if the company is close to bankruptcy. We could wake up to find we’ve been made redundant tomorrow.
Over the past 20 months, I have learned the lesson of accepting uncertainty and actually being at peace with it. But sometimes we need mirrors to see where we are still not practicing it. For me recently, it was on the romantic front, despite me saying it and meaning it, but not realizing I wasn’t feeling it in my heart.
For a long time, I was trying to control the dating process by putting pressure on myself to figure out if someone was the right life partner for me within just a few dates. But it completely sucked the excitement out of the process of meeting and getting to know somebody, putting arbitrary time limits on every moment we spent together.
When I recognised this, I realised that enjoying the process of falling in love was more important to me than certainty. And to truly experience the joy of this process, I had to surrender fully to not knowing. I had to stop trying to control what I simply couldn’t control.
If we knew exactly whom we would marry, when, how many kids we would have, which gender and how each one would turn out; where’s the fun in that? Where is the adventure? We all crave a certain level of certainty to feel secure, but too much leaves no room for unexpected joy in our lives.
However, with all things, there is a balance. I wrote recently about taking the decision to freeze my eggs. By doing this, I am giving myself a sense of control in one area of my life, in order to allow myself to fully surrender in another: meeting the right person.
As humans, we are ingrained to seek and cling on to security. But, if you knew exactly at what age, what time and how you would die, would that not make life less fun to live and experience? Relish in the uncertainty. Surrender to it and enjoy the ride.
Surrendering to uncertainly allows us to truly enjoy life