The Beauty of Giving Up

The image through the tent door - it was so beautiful! But I couldn’t see it.

It is interesting—the moment we give up trying, whatever it was we were seeking often finally makes itself known.

Take me, for example.

As the story goes, my dad didn’t want kids. Then, one day at a family reunion, my cute five-year-old cousin Beth walked up to him, grabbed his hand, and took him for a walk. That was it. He was hooked. Kids it would be.

But things don’t always work out as planned. My parents were both "older" for those days, and deciding you want children isn’t the same as actually having them. Eventually, they decided they might as well give up trying and began to consider adoption instead. That very month, my mom became pregnant. Half a century later, here I am.

In a very different example, half a world away, I once found myself on a vision quest on the Scottish Isle of Mull. It was the early 2000s, and I was living in St. Andrews for the year. I don’t even remember what led me to sign up in the first place. I had always thought of myself as rather outdoorsy, rugged, and capable. I realized very quickly, however, that my Newport Beach versions of those concepts were quite different from what they actually meant on a remote, western Scottish island.

Part of the quest involved a 24-hour solo in the wilderness. We were also fasting—no food, and no coffee. At the time, the caffeine withdrawal was a complete dealbreaker; it absolutely would have made me reconsider the entire thing had I not already been stuck in the middle of it. I was handed a tent I had no idea how to assemble and sent out in a direction with orders not to come back for a day.

This was the pre-smartphone era. There was no communication, no way of passing the time other than to find a spot, figure out how to pitch the tent, and get out of what had turned into a torrential downpour. It's worth mentioning that as a Southern Californian, my idea of "rain gear" had been a pair of nylon sweatpants from Old Navy. They were not exactly up to Scottish standards.

I was miserable.

I finally got the tent set up—mostly—good enough to crawl inside and out of the deluge. I sat there feeling immensely sorry for myself, wishing for caffeine, and wondering how I would ever make it through twenty-four hours of no food and nothing to do but sulk and take self-timer shots of my own misery.

The rain had clearly passed by the following morning - but my sulk had not!

Somehow, the time passed. The next day, we gathered back together in a circle to recount our solo experiences. When it came my turn, I held nothing back. I confessed that I was miserable, I hated it, and absolutely nothing holy had happened except for a massive headache and wet clothes.

And then, an amazing thing occurred: it lifted. The sourness, the sulking, the misery—it just evaporated. I felt lighter. I felt freer. I felt, dare I say it, content?

Fast forward to this week. I had been working on a project that seemed to have stalled. It was a good project, one I was genuinely enjoying, but it felt as though there wasn't really a place for it yet. I decided to set it aside. Not to erase it, delete it, or get rid of it—but to simply place it on a shelf and begin working on something else. A new initiative that carried immediate potential and excitement.

If the original project didn’t want to be born right now, I wasn’t going to force it. I’d just move on to what was next.

But the strange thing was, the moment I made that decision—as soon as I chose to let it go and look ahead—the pieces of the original project suddenly began to fall into place. It didn't happen in the exact way I had initially envisioned, but it was as though the work was tapping me on the shoulder saying, “Hey, wait a second, I’m still here!” By stopping the "trying," I had somehow freed up the constricted energy, allowing the project to find its own way forward.

What is it about letting go that frees up life in this way?

It is as though once we loosen our desperate grasping, that which we were so fervently seeking finally has the room to take root within us—and to be born through us.