Zen for Normal People
“The peace that comes with surrendered action turns to a sense of aliveness when you actually enjoy what you are doing.”
Reading Time: 1 minute, 30 seconds
Science tells us the body of a human adult has around 7 octillion (7,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000) atoms. That’s a lot of atoms.
It also tells us those 7 octillion atoms are 99% empty space. (Hmmm… Is that why there are so many zeroes?)
So, basically, these so-called “atoms” aren’t what they appear to be...which means the human body they comprise isn’t what it appears to be…which means the “you” that you think you are… aren’t what you appear to be.
—-—> Ponder that for a moment.
I spoke with a friend this week who is going through intensive treatment for high-risk breast cancer at age 48, during the coronavirus, with 3 young kids at home, on the heels of a gut-wrenching divorce—and, not long before all of this, she lost her father.
My friend was pretty zen about it.
“Why aren’t you yelling and throwing shit?” I asked her.
“I’m over fighting,” she said.
Surrender.
What does surrender look like when life is kicking your a** from every conceivable direction? Does it mean giving up? Or does it mean something else entirely? What does surrender look like when life isn’t kicking you that hard at the moment compared to others? How do you “surrender” at a time when every cell in your body seems to want to fight?
(And what’s a cell again? Oh yeah, 99% empty space.)
I found myself telling her a story about my mother who also had breast cancer.
One day, towards the end of Mom’s life, I helped her take a shower because she couldn’t do it by herself anymore. I held her as she closed her eyes and let the water wash over the body that had gotten her this far, but that she could no longer rely upon. Despite the intense pain of a body in its final days, she smiled as if she’d never felt more free.
“I’m so grateful for my life,” she said, crying one of those joy sort of cries.
It was one of the most profound moments of my life. Not because I’d never seen her so naked and helpless before, although there was that. Helpless wasn’t a word anyone would use to describe my mother. She’d had doctors stumped for over a decade, pushing her body to survive long past its expiration date. Now she had the hospice nurses scratching their heads.
The reason why this moment was so transformative for me—and, I’m guessing, also for her—was because it was the first time I’d ever seen true surrender in her. She wasn’t fighting anymore, pushing against the tide of life, trying to control the crap out of it, bend it to her will, worry and wrestle it into something other than what it was. There was none of the usual over-activity, fear, anxiety, speed. There was peace. Trust. Gratitude.
Stillness.
Surrender.
As I finished telling my friend the story, I said: “Why do we wait until we are dying to let go and enjoy life?”
Why do we wait until life has us pinned down with some sort of jackknife to say: okay, I get it?
Why, even when things are going relatively well for us, do we insist on finding new, stupid ways to be miserable and complain instead of deeply accepting our lives—and creating, if we so desire, from there?
We can all agree that sometimes life isn’t likeable. Sometimes it’s 100% unacceptable and hair-pulling. But haven’t we spent enough time fighting that fact? Not that there’s anything wrong with fighting… or the anger that drives it. Sometimes you have to get good and angry, fight the fight. And sometimes you need to fight only to reach the point of being so sick of fighting, so sick of your self-created mental stories and baloney sandwiches, that you finally let go—ultimately realizing the only purpose of the fight was to see the peace you were after was here all along.
What if, instead of fighting this day, we commit to surrendered action instead?
What if, instead of me against Life, me against Covid-19, me against them, me against cancer, me against the scary future, me against whatever, whomever—we embrace the 99% space that we are?
What would it look like to allow life to move through us, to flow us, recognizing we are life itself?
What is it that we are fighting again?
And who is it that’s fighting?
Happy Mother’s Day Weekend, all. ❤
Put down the boxing gloves,
KB
