Surrender

It has been more than two months since I last published anything on this blog. I have had plenty of good intentions about sitting down at the computer and putting together some thoughts, but each and every time my fingers were about to touch the keyboard, I became distracted by one thing or the other and the impulse to write soon passed into thin air. The reason why I have found the necessary discipline to write is that I have discovered a topic that has sparked the flame of interest vital to any quality piece: surrender.



This word has been floating around my mind in various forms since I arrived in Los Angeles four months ago. The fact that I was even open to the idea of returning someplace that contained so many painful memories was an act of surrender, although I did not realize it as such when it first happened. Perhaps this is why it was effective, for the simple reason that I did not see it coming, for if I had, I do not think I would have been remotely open to the idea of returning to this city. But I remember the exact moment of surrendering to the idea that I wanted to live here again. It was a cold and rainy day here, one in which the drops kept softly falling from the sky, sometimes harder and sometimes softer. I was in Los Angeles because the school at which I was working sent me here to be trained in the Hebrew Language program we were using to instruct our students. Two weeks before I came to Los Angeles, I had the unfortunate experience of getting an ear plug lodged deep into my right ear. I thought that the natural process of time would dislodge the ear plug, but much to my discomfort, the foam found a resting place in my ear beyond the reach of my thick fingers. I woke up on the morning after I arrived here with my ear ringing louder than it had it weeks and in more pain than I was willing to tolerate. Fortunately, I did not mind finding any excuse to miss out on the tiresome training sessions that I was sent here to sit through. The closest hospital to my location was the Encino Hospital on Ventura Blvd. It was my lucky day because I did not have to spend the duration of the morning waiting in the emergency room, which would have been even worse than sitting through the training sessions. I was the only patient in fact, and the ear plug was removed with a narrow pair of tweezers about an hour after I first arrived. When I left the hospital, I was literally singing in the rain over the fact that the ear plug was no longer blocking my hearing. A funny thing happened at that moment: I made my peace with this city and I felt like it was time to come back. I also realized that this was the same hospital that had been the last place I ever saw my father alive 13 years before.



I never said that surrender was easy. There are times in fact that surrender is very painful. To make moving back to Los Angeles a possibility, I had to give up on some things that I would have never voluntarily walked away from. The most important of these was my teaching job that for two years had become the center of my life. But through a series of misdirected and misunderstood relationships, the wheel of losing my job was set into motion. The speed of the spinning wheel accelerated so fast in fact despite my best efforts to slow it down that I was relieved of my teaching duties on the last day of school.



Heartbroken I was, yet hopeless I was not. Somehow, I knew that there was a higher purpose to these misfortunes, and if I could only hold out hope just a little bit longer, I would soon start to see this light within the darkness. The going at first this past summer however was not very easy because I knew that I could no longer find courage and hope through the ability to stand my ground and battle through some of life's greatest tragedies. For me to find true happiness from now on, I knew I needed to find courage and hope through a different force, one that I call surrender, even if it meant saying goodbye again. It is through surrender that I have learned to love, forgive, understand, listen, and feel true compassion for others. I have become the person I have wanted through this calm, gentle, steady, and softly forceful energy that guides me more and more each day as I slowly gain the confidence and trust to allow it to lead each and every step I take.



My dreams are coming true less as a result of fighting my way through life and more because I am able to calmly breathe my way through challenging situations. Acceptance comes with surrender, as does the understanding of what my responsibilities are to myself and to others. I am more thoughtful in my actions and less prone to overreacting to situations beyond my control as I have embraced the warmth, beauty, strength, and most importantly the acceptance of this amazing and miraculous force that I label surrender.