Experimenting with surrender

Why I'm surrendering to time.

Surrender is a word that doesn’t always have the best connotations. We think of waving a white flag, of giving up, of defeat. For some in history, death was preferable to surrender. Surrender was cowardice, it was weakness, it was shame.

A couple of years ago, if you’d asked me for my thoughts on surrender, I likely would have responded something like this:

Surrender was a concept I was bumping up against a lot, particularly in terms of both writing and mental health. Over and over, again and again, there was that idea of surrender being a good thing. It was inescapable. Want to write better? Surrender. Want to stop feeling things like self-loathing and anxiety and hurt? Surrender.

But then there was the conflicting advice, often more prevalent until recently, to never surrender. Want to write well? Don’t give up. Want to not be depressed? Keep going. It’s not a stretch then to say that these two opposing strategies seem entirely at odds with one another. So if I wanted to write a novel, I’d have to both give in and keep going?

The clue there is in ‘give in’. Notice how it’s not ‘give up’? It’s because surrender isn’t really about failure, but about acceptance instead.

Surrender is about yielding, but it’s also about repeating, about restoring. Its Latin roots are in super and reddere, meaning ‘above, over’ and ‘give back, return, restore’, and more recently Old French gave us sur and rendre, meaning ‘over, above, beyond, in addition’ and ‘give back, yield’ but also ‘repeat’. It seems even the origins of surrender are hazy, muddled, like no one could really decide whether surrender was good or bad, right or wrong.

Which is the whole point, really. Nothing is so black and white, and neither should your approach to writing or your mental health be so. Sometimes it’s about repetition, about carrying on, about coming back regardless, and sometimes it’s about yielding.

I’ve been practising surrendering to imperfection, of course - that’s what this newsletter is all about - but there is one thing I’ve been surrendering to recently that has changed my relationship with imperfection for the better: time.

Surrendering to time

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

There’s no point beating about the bush: this is entirely influenced by Oliver Burkeman’s ‘Four Thousand Weeks’. It’s my current bedtime read and it’s been blowing my mind, so much so that already I can see its influence upon my daily life.

I can’t tell you that, however, without giving you a look at some of the passages I’ve highlighted - of which there are over 50 so far. But probably the biggest gut punch came in the form of this line early on in the book:

“The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control.”

I am extremely guilty of telling myself that things will be better/quieter/calmer if I get these tasks done or get that thing over with or even get over that fear of perfection. But the thing is, calm and control come in waves, and so do problems and panic. 

Burkeman’s book advocates for flexibility, for seeing time not as a commodity but simply life itself. By trying to control time, to fit time to our needs and desires, we leave no room for mistakes, for the spontaneity and unpredictability of life itself, of which time is.

“Your reward for surrendering the fantasy of controlling the pace of reality is to achieve, at last, a real sense of purchase on that reality - of really getting stuck in to life.”

The change in my thinking didn’t become apparent to me until last week. Mark and I went for a city break in Bristol, just an hour and a bit away on the train. However, due to the notoriously terrible state of affairs that is the British railway system, our train back from Bristol was cancelled. 

Now usually I hate travelling. To be particular, I hate the waiting before you travel. So when we suddenly had two hours to kill, hauling our luggage around the wet and windy city, you would be forgiven for thinking I was irritable.

Instead, I got an ice cream whilst the rain pelted Bristol’s leafy college green. We wandered to the shops and impulse purchased a framed print for our kitchen which I then decided, also impulsively, to carry back with us rather than getting it shipped. And then when we did catch our train, my arm in some state of rigor mortis from clutching my bin bag-wrapped purchase, there were no seats. We spent the journey standing, my head colliding repeatedly with the train door, both of us shuffling our luggage and our new, cumbersome print around to let people pass. And it was fine. I felt no despair, no anger, no annoyance at the fact that my trip home had not gone the way we’d planned. It was just what it was, and life going off course, time unspooling in the way it wished, meant I actually got to have fancy ice cream and later hang a new picture, none of that at the expense of my own happiness or my sense of control. Because I can’t control time, as much as I used to convince myself. None of us can. 

Time and perfectionism are inextricably linked. As my best friend Oliver says:

“When you try to focus on something you deem important, you’re forced to face your limits, an experience that feels especially uncomfortable precisely because the task at hand is one you value so much.”

It’s possible for perfectionism to plague every little thing we do, but it’s not always the reality. It’s unlikely we’re always aiming for perfection when working a job we hate, or when raising a newborn. That’s because perfectionism is a fear of failure, of vulnerability, of accepting there is in fact an end to what you can achieve. But to achieve anything at all, we need to come to terms with the fact that our dreams will fall short of reality.

It comes back to that “fantasy of controlling the pace of reality”. By striving for perfection, we are attempting to control the future. We want a guarantee that the hard work we’re putting in right now will pay off in some way that’s meaningful to us - whether that be through success, praise or recognition. The thought of pouring ourselves into something we love only to be told it’s terrible, or it to simply be forgotten, is terrifying.

But there will be nothing for people to critique if we don’t even start to begin with. It then comes down to a choice of how we spend our four thousand weeks. It’s a terrifying notion, but only by confronting the reality that we have a finite amount of life to live can we work up the courage to focus on the things that matter most to us. It will mean letting go of some things, and sometimes it will mean persevering when nothing is going your way, but we can choose to prioritise those more intangible things that we do in fact control, like our happiness and our values, our desires and attention.

And so I’ll leave you with this final quote from Burkeman:

“There is an alternative: the unfashionable but powerful notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history.”