Surrendering

About two months ago, my family and I took a trip to southern Spain. The first week of the trip was spent at an artist’s retreat and was profoundly enlightening for me. While you can read about the discoveries of the retreat and its impacts on our life at my web site, I wanted to share a particular lesson that continues to benefit me.

With this vacation, there were a lot of unknowns for me and my family. When we started to put the trip together, especially the portion of the trip that involved the retreat, we had a lot of big questions: What does one do at an art retreat? Who were we going to meet? What were we going to do all day? What was our 6-year-old going to do all day? Would we be able to actually do art with our child there? What if we didn’t fit in? What if we didn’t deliver good art? Where we crazy for doing this?

These questions and so many more seemed to stay with us as we got closer to the day of our trip. It was obvious we felt more than a little anxiety.

My wife and I love to travel, but it had been while since we took a real adventure, and with the other changes happening in our lives this year, we had become dependent on the perceived stability of our life routines.

In our everyday grind, we have grown wary of the unknowns. Meeting new people, going to new places, making big decisions that affect your life – we had become shy and anxiety ridden over these types of decisions and discoveries. I think we spend our days crafting a pretty rigid structure around our lives and minimizing the unknowns. We get anxious about the things we don’t know, the things we can’t control.

But what can we control? There are no knowns in life, yet it’s this notion of stability, this collection of routines we build our lives around, that I think give us not only a false sense of security, an illogical sense of security: you don’t know what the future brings, there are only unknowns.

Yet, we had lost our ability to enjoy the unknown. To crave it. To revel in it. To drink in that sense of adventure.

Neither of us had ever been on an artist retreat before. Neither of us had been to this part of Spain (in fact, I hadn’t been to Spain at all). My Spanish was very, very rusty and my wife and son didn’t speak any. But at some point, probably in the hours before we got on the plane, I think we all came to terms with the fact that our adventure was an adventure into the unknown. It was something we would not be able to control. We had to make the best of it. We had to surrender to it if we were going to enjoy it. If we were going to reap any reward from it.

And with that small shift, with that opening up to the possibilities of the adventure, with the understanding that we were at the mercy of everything around us, we were able to experience the profound joy of discovery, friendship, adventure, creativity and more.

Every day we were completely engaged, completely present in our new world. We became the people that are hidden inside us. The people we enjoy being. We bonded with great new people. We made amazing friends. We created beautiful art. We learned from brilliant masters. We were in the presence of amazing artist. We had wonderful conversations. We drank glorious wine. We ate scrumptious food. My son made his own discoveries and friends and memories. We not only survived the trip, we are still finding ways to bring that trip into our everyday lives.

Surrendering was what we needed.

Openness and vulnerability; these are the keys to unlocking the delight in life. Surrendering to the unknowns allows amazing connections to happen, it allows the surprises to surface. Yet we create this anxiety around not knowing what lies around that next corner. We want to control what can’t ever be controlled.

So today, if you can, change things up a bit. Sprinkle a bit of adventure, of the unknown, into your day. Then surrender to it. You will discover some amazing new things.