Surrender Is an Active Verb
Surrender is a word soaked with negative connotations. To surrender is to be weak. You surrender when you have no more will to fight, when you lack strength, when you lack belief. Surrendering can seem like a character flaw, especially in victory-at-any-cost America. Never surrender, never give up. Persist, resist, insist.
But surrendering isn’t necessarily about giving up, or weakness, or passivity. The act of resignation, of ceding, can be an act of opening oneself up, of receptivity. It can be as brave and bold as any victory.
It’s a paradox: a collapse that invites fullness. Sometimes you have to give up power to gain power. Sometimes you have to lose the argument to win the argument. And that in turn changes the rules of power and the nature of winning.
“The creative self,” wrote the poet Jane Hirshfield, “[asks] the surrender of ordinary conceptions of identity and will for a broader kind of intimacy and allegiance.”
In Hirshfield’s terms, surrender becomes a radical, transformative act. A redefinition of ego and will and success.
Surrender creates new spaces of being.
When we surrender ourselves to our art, we allow ourselves to soften. Surrender invites us to give ourselves up to something larger, to meld with wonder and awe. Surrender…
