By Dr. Bev Walpole – Clinical Psychologist, Guelph, Ontario, and Founder of Haven Wellness by Design

I've been thinking about surrender lately.
Not surrender as in giving up. Something more subtle.

The kind of surrender that asks you to stop trying so hard to make everything happen. To loosen your grip on the things you cannot control.

This is difficult for me.

I am very good at doing. I can make a plan, solve a problem, send the email, change the strategy, find the answer. If there is space, my instinct is usually to fill it.

And lately I've been wondering what happens when I don't.
Because we are surrounded by evidence that life knows how to create without us.

Take a baby.

We don't actually make a baby.
We participate in creating the conditions, but then something else takes over.

Cells divide. Organs form. A heart starts beating. Fingers appear. A tiny human becomes a larger human.

We don't direct any of it.
We didn't create the DNA.
We didn't design the instructions.
We don't tell the heart when to start beating or the brain when to begin forming connections.
We don't even understand all of it.

And yet we trust it to happen.

We don't spend nine months thinking, I really need to make this baby develop.
We surrender to a process that is happening through us, but not because of us.

And then, somehow, we grow up and forget.

We start believing that everything important in our lives has to be made.

The career.
The relationship.
The business.
The next opportunity.
The next version of ourselves.

We push. We optimize. We strategize. We reach.
And sometimes that is exactly what is required.

But when we're accustomed to always doing more, it can be difficult to recognize when our need to be productive is becoming a need to control.

And sometimes I wonder if we're trying to manufacture things that cannot actually be manufactured.

Maybe there is a difference between creating the conditions for something to happen and making it happen.

We can plant the seed.
We can water it.
We can put it somewhere with enough light.
But we cannot pull the stem out of the soil.

And I think this is where I am right now.

Learning to do what is mine to do—and then leave some room for what isn't.

To send the email and not immediately send another one.
To have an idea without turning it into a project.
To rest without deciding what that rest is going to accomplish.
To let a quiet day be a quiet day.
To stop interpreting space as evidence that I should be doing more.
To recognize that rest doesn't have to be earned through productivity.

Because maybe nothing is wrong.

Maybe nothing needs fixing.
Maybe something is happening that I simply can't see yet.

That, for me, is the real practice of surrender.

Not caring less.
Not wanting less.
Not doing nothing.

Just loosening my grip on the belief that I have to make it all happen.
There is so much life happening beyond our conscious effort.

We didn't make ourselves.
We don't make the sun rise.
We don't make our hearts beat.
We don't make ourselves fall in love.

And we certainly don't know everything that is already quietly becoming.

Maybe we can participate without controlling.
Maybe we can prepare the soil and trust the seed.
Maybe we can stop digging it up to check whether it's growing.
Maybe sometimes the most courageous thing we can do is simply allow.

And see what happens.