Surrendered but Not Passive
Photo by Sabine Schulte on Unsplash
I possess two character traits that can sometimes confuse people.
They’re not paradoxical (though I am quite into paradoxes at the moment), but they are nuanced.
Here are the traits:
I go through the world in a state of deep surrender.
But I’m not at all passive.
Do you understand what I mean by that? The difference between going through the world in a state of deep surrender and being passive?
I could use a lot of words to try to explain it, but instead, I’ll make my Irish ancestors proud and tell a (wordy) story.
As most (if not all) of you know, Sam and I are currently undergoing fertility treatments. I’m sitting in Taipei at this very moment, perched at a coffee shop just 10 steps from our IVF clinic.
And I am deeply surrendered to the outcome of these fertility treatments.
My best guess about our richest, most rewarding, most fulfilling lifetime is that it includes children. I think Sam and I are well-suited to the role of raising children, and I believe we’ll enjoy doing it together. I (gasp) think parenting will be fun (and Sam thinks that I’m delusional for thinking that).
But I’m also acutely aware that I could be wrong. Maybe parenting would be the worst. Maybe Sam would be miserable as a dad, and I would be miserable as a mom, and once kids arrived, we’d spend decades of our lives yearning for the glorious freedom we had pre-kids.
Do you know that my paternal grandmother took her own life when she had four young children?
You know that things like that happen, right? So do tragedies and hardships and intensely hard things. My roommate in rehab lost her infant son to SIDS. She didn’t have an addiction problem before that; it happened after.
Guys - I know nothing. I can’t tell you if the child who would fill our home with the kind of soaring joy that we get from spending time with our nieces and nephews will come from my womb, or from adoption, or from a surrogate. Or if that child won’t come at all because our best lives, our richest, most rewarding, most fulfilling, radiant, joy-filled lives… well, maybe those lives don’t include children.
I don’t know if the best unfolding is for a baby to join our family in 2024 or years from now. Do you know that Human Design and the Gene Keys say a whole new TYPE OF HUMAN will start being born in 2027?! Do you think I’d be sad if I got to be the mother to a whole new type of human?! Or if we “fish our wish” and take home a dragon baby this year?! Beautiful outcomes, both.
So there’s the surrender. I ask – repeatedly and enthusiastically – for our lives to unfold in a beautiful way. I sit in ceremony and cast that prayer. But I recognize that I have no idea what our most beautiful lives look like. So I don’t try to bully the Universe into complying with my half-baked plans. Because letting “Infinite Intelligence” chime in – well, that feels pretty wise to me.
And yet – here’s the nuance – I’m not even remotely passive. Perhaps you caught the sentence where I said that I’m writing this musing 10 steps from the IVF clinic. When conceiving children naturally didn’t happen for us, Sam and I sought medical help.
I have preferences. I have hopes and dreams. I am more than willing to use time, money, energy, and all the things pursuing said hopes and dreams.
Surrendered. But not passive.
Maybe going through the world surrendered but not passive would be a formula for misery for some of you. Perhaps it only works for me because of my specific chart.
But I gotta say – for at least some of us, there’s a lot of inner peace to be had walking this path. And I know that because I’ve lived both ways - on this path and off it. I didn’t arrive in adulthood surrendered and trusting. I showed up as a control freak. And then spiritual practices like shamanism showed me the beauty of this alternative way of living.
There’s a beautiful Zen proverb that says, “Let go or be dragged,” and I think a deep contemplation of that wisdom could change a lot of lives.
Wishing you infinite flow and zero forcing,
Keely
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Morning Musings is a delight-first writing practice where I wake up, put my fingers on the keyboard, and see what comes up. Sometimes I publish in a whirling twirling frenzy, sending out musings every morning. Sometimes weeks pass in between publishing anything. And the joy of a delight-first practice is that anything goes. If you’d like to read along, you can subscribe here: https://keelyc.substack.com/
