Even under seemingly “normal” circumstances, surrendering to uncertainty can be incredibly difficult. I'm often impatient with myself, and siloing my life into “spiritual practice time” versus everything else fosters habitual ways of being that are so very difficult to rely on when you need them most.

Even before the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak that has defined the year of 2020, surrendering to life felt like such an incredibly radical act of trust only achievable through constant vigilance or indefinite submission to a monastery. With so many human and non-humans suffering together, the low hum of menace that permeates all interactions and the media waves makes me feel as if I'm back to the basics, as if we've softly brushed up against the reset button.

Personally, I'll admit having felt a low-level anxiety buzzing under the surface for most of my adolescence and into my adult life. While I don't claim to speak for all millenials, many friends close to me in age report a similar sense of dread about the future and our present destructive tendencies as a species. And this pandemic highlights how we truly walk the razor's edge as we carve out a path for our species into the unknown.

In this uncertain time I'm trying to reinvent what my relationship to the present, and therefore the future looks like. This doesn't mean that I stop planning or develop some sense of complacency towards the future. Quite the opposite. Sowing the seeds of presence now helps give me a sense of clarity-in-action that supports the highest good I can imagine for the future. Times like this help us lay down our differences, and act out of love, integrity, and symbiosis. So it's back to the basics: knowing that I don't know.

Of course there are an endless amount of questions: why is this happening? Why didn't we collectively see a pandemic coming? How are we allowing so many to suffer? Why weren't we prepared? Why do we only focus on the human impact, when global warming and ecological collapse probably created this problem? Logically I can argue with the situation all I'd like. Logically I can say that it's obvious a global crisis was coming and that we've been driving our gas-guzzling SUV-of-a-civilization towards a cliff for decades. But truly, the massive amount of suffering experienced by so many, through sickness or through isolation renders all my conclusions and righteousness irrelevant. So again: I don't know.

My tendency to argue with the way things are lies in direct contradiction to a spiritual path. Some say the path ends when we choose to accept and love things as they are. In a word, we might call this surrender.

I began to consider the idea of surrender more seriously when I read Michael Singer's The Surrender Experiment, and recognized that this concept was more than just a spiritual truism, it's a way of life. In the book Michael tells a truly inspiring life story about his relationship with the divine and how that relationship was defined by his decision to approach every event that happened to him as an opportunity to let go of control. Instead of arguing with the way things are or what was happening, Michael looked at every potential crisis as a catalyst for change that his current self couldn’t imagine.

This attitude allowed him to flow into a state of acceptance of the trials and tribulation that face us all on our journey. Michael points out that “each of us actually believes that things should be the way we want them, instead of being the natural result of all the forces of creation”. Isn’t it true? We are so very upset when things don’t turn out like we want, and assume that the world shouldn’t be this way. We assume some divine creator really, really messed up.

The cultural zeitgeist of the modern era is defined around the idea of a privileged individual achiever, and the assertion that we work hard enough, if we struggle enough, if we argue deeply enough with reality, that we can have it any way we want. The universe will open up to us, because in this modern human experiment we are limited only by our own laziness. When we see injustice in the world, the good in us feels compelled to end it, and if we work hard enough then we can create the fair, just world we assume God intended.

Michael noticed this tendency early in his life, and asked himself “am I better off making up an alternate reality in my mind and then fighting with reality to make it be my way, or am I better off letting go of what I want and serving the same forces of reality that managed to create the entire perfection of the universe around me?”

The first time I considered this kind of relationship with existence I found it profound… and so deeply impractical that I couldn’t bring myself to take it seriously on a gross level. Part of me believed that it was naive, and so privileged to assume that any of us could really give up struggling with the reality we see around us. There’s just so much suffering in the world. There’s just so much injustice. Just because one privileged person feels safe enough to let go of their desires and ambitions to trust God… well.

I challenged my “practical” belief in triumph over adversity by asking myself where I would be if I hadn’t struggled so hard to get where I am today. Hasn’t every opportunity, every event in my life been the culmination of some struggle? But when I examined this belief more deeply I began to see cracks in my own armour. In fact, for every victory I can count, the story could be retold as an opportunity having been gifted to me, not a heroic journey through fire and fury. While I may have been working towards a particular goal very diligently at any point in life, the biggest upsets, the most glorious victories, the triumphs over all odds were actually the result of some completely unexpected and unpredicted event coming out of left-field. Some would call this luck, or becoming accident-prone. Another word for it might be grace.

Living this way is an art. It requires interrupting the deeply ingrained patterns of unsatisfactoriness that I cling to so dearly to drive and motivate myself. I was taught so many stories about how struggle is the way we live, the way we relate to life. But upon reexamination, I realize that the same set of events that brought me to where I am today could be told through the lens of grace, and saying yes to an opportunity that arose out of crisis. Nearly every event that I am so grateful for in retrospect (a job offer, a loving partner, finding a sense of community, discovering my spiritual path) was incubated by an event that I felt resistance to (the loss of a job, the ending of a relationship, a period of loneliness in a foreign place, the utter loss of who I thought I was supposed to be).

I struggled when Michael posited that “no matter who we are, life is going to put us through the changes we need to go through. The question is: Are we willing to use this force for our transformation?” While I still find it difficult to embody this attitude towards living every day I’m intrigued by the idea of letting go and practicing nonresistance as a way of life, whether I like what is happening or not.

This is not spiritual bypassing, as some might be tempted to argue. Neither Michael nor I are suggesting that avoiding pain and being lazy is the correct posture for a surrender experiment. In fact making a true attempt at living this way requires intense introspection and psychological examination; a process that I’m constantly having to apply with immediacy and presence. If you intend to interrupt the ingrained pattern of arguing with the way you assume life is supposed to be, then you must transform the very way you think and respond to what’s happening.

And that brings us back to today, and the slow, silent train wreck that’s unfolding around us. How in the world can we surrender to this terrible event that’s claiming so many lives and causing untold human suffering?

I can’t provide you with guidance about the best way to grieve. The unfathomable sadness that surrounds a pandemic needs to be processed at the individual, cultural and societal levels, and it’s not something we can simply pick up and move on from next year.

But the lessons in surrender still apply. We can choose to argue with the way we assume things are supposed to be, or we can allow things to be as they are, ideally with a bit of hope to color in the bleakness of this moment. I’ve had to take time off of the constant barrage of terrible news, and spend more time reconnecting with my friends, family, and neighbors, even if it’s been through phone calls and other virtual means. What I’ve seen emerge outside of the news channels is a sense that however this may end up, we’re all in this together, more than we were before.

So I invite you, now, to close your eyes and sit with the question: do I really know how this will all turn out in the end? We’ve been told the worst-case scenarios for how this pandemic could play out. Since we can’t know, because we don’t know the answer, take a moment and imagine the very best possible world that could arise out of this tragedy.

We can’t predict the world we will live in when this is all over. Without denying the hardship we’re facing, a deep shift in our consciousness may result from this collective experience, and we may come together as a global community in ways never seen before. This is my hope, my dream, and the part I hope to play in whatever comes next for our human family. For now, I will continue to mourn for the suffering of untold masses, and surrender to the hope that there is a new world, a new paradigm we can’t even conceive of awaiting us on the other end of this crisis.

With love, I ask that if you are able to stay home, stay home. If you cannot, please be safe and practice what social distancing you can.