A couple of years ago, I was in the midst of what felt like a crisis at work. As tends to happen in the perception of a crisis, things seemed to be moving very quickly. I could feel tension building all around me, though if I’m honest, it was hard to distinguish what was actually around me versus inside of me. The tension inside of me felt like it might swallow me whole.
I should hold a meeting, I thought. I dreaded the idea of a meeting, actually, but communication was flying and it seemed like various people might be upset. Having a meeting and trying to stop the swirl seemed like the necessary thing to do.
And then I talked to my coach. I’d started working with her not long prior to help me get better at things just like this – navigating the sticky complexity of running a business. “I just don’t know if I should ask everyone to rearrange their schedules to do the meeting tomorrow, or wait until next week,” I told her anxiously.
“What if you gave it a few weeks?” she asked me calmly.
I barely registered what she said, my eyes instead darting to the calendar to scan the following day versus the following week.
I continued, “I don’t want to stress people with a last minute meeting, but I don’t want it to seem like I’m sitting on this. Maybe tomorrow is better.”
She persisted. “What would it mean to sit on it?”
“Oh. Hmmm…” I paused. “I guess it would mean I didn’t care or that I wasn’t trying to address this issue.”
“But is that true?” she asked, of course already knowing the answer. “Do you not care?”
“Of course I care! Too much maybe.” I grimaced.
“We’ll talk about that in a minute,” she smiled. “But yes, of course you care. You care so much that you are not going to meet situation this with urgency. It’s important to you, and that’s why you’re not going to have a meeting.”
“I’m not?” I looked at her thoughtfully.
“I mean, you’ll choose, of course. But don’t choose to act just because you believe that acting is the only option, or because you think it’s the only thing that signals that it matters.”
I sat with that for a moment, recognizing clearly in myself what she was reflecting back. I most certainly carried the belief that if it mattered, I needed to do something. That I needed to act. To decide. To figure it out.
She watched as I pondered, and then asked, “What do you think will happen if you just wait?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “That they will get worse. That I’ll feel useless. That things will completely fall apart.” I knew I was being dramatic, but I was speaking from my heart. Or more accurately, from my fear.
“And what if they don’t?”
I considered her question. I couldn’t imagine that things would get better on their own. But I was willing to experiment with this option – this just allowing of life to move forward without jumping in to fix or adjust or even decide. After a few moments, I told her I was willing to try it, even while skeptical of it. It was a decision to not make a decision, if you will. We agreed that if in a month I still felt like a meeting was necessary, I’d schedule it then.
You won’t be surprised to hear that a month later, the issue had essentially resolved. Letting life happen meant that the people involved had mostly figured things out on their own/ The dynamics of it all had significantly shifted, and I felt wholly different about the crisis than I had before. In fact, I no longer thought it had ever even been a crisis. Funny how that happened.
–
I could be said to have what is called in the business world a bias toward action. I want to act on the world. I want to make decisions and move things along. It can feel unnatural to sit with uncertainty or let life just play out on her terms.
I think most of us – including those who aren’t quite as action-oriented – struggle against the concept of uncertainty. Even if we aren’t inclined to take decisive action, we reject uncertainty by letting our decisions wrestle with each other inside of us. We have a sense that we have to pick a lane,. We have to figure things out.
We think we have to obsess or decide or act – to do what we think of us as living life – but another option actually exists, which is to let life live us for a while.
Letting life live us – rather than efforting to live a particular kind or version of life – is a form of non-striving. It means not deciding. Letting things work themselves out. Allowing things to unfold in their own way and at their own pace.
For someone like me, it’s a bit counterintuitive. In my stressiest moments, it can feel almost masochistic. Just let things happen?
It challenges the very ethos on which so much of our culture is built. We’re told to make something of ourselves. To forge our path. To create opportunity. To heal what’s broken. We’re told that if we want things to change, we’re going to have to be the ones to change them.
Which is curious really, because while I can’t speak for you – I’ve never known things to stay the same. Even when I very much wanted them to.
My kids get older. Plants bloom and then wither. Ideas evolve. Friendships deepen or they wane. Excitement fades. My body softens. Nothing ever stays as it was.
It’s so obvious on the one hand that my acting on it is wholly unnecessary for life to keep life-ing, and yet I can get so caught in the myth. The myth that I have to make the most correct decision, or that my happiness is utterly dependent on my arriving at the right conclusion.
But how many times have I looked back over my life and said some version of, “Thank goodness I didn’t get what I thought I wanted.” It’s been a lot of times.
Or how many times have I experienced life acting on me to lead me somewhere I never could have predicted, and ended up so wildly grateful. Many, many times.
What I’m suggesting here is not that life always leads us down beautiful paths, but rather that – simply – life always leads us.
Life is a force and it doesn’t let things stagnate. It lets pain – even the pain that seems permanent – move and ease. It reveals things to us at its own pace and its own way, and the maddening reality of it is that they are things we never could have known or even predicted without the gift of time.
As I personally started to dig into this idea, I began to see it everywhere – in all of the philosophers and poets that I love, each with their own version.
Rumi wrote, “Try not to resist the changes that come your way. Instead, let life live through you.”
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “And as for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.”
And Parker Palmer wrote, “Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.”
It struck me that the people paying the closest attention to our human experience had all arrived at the same conclusion. They knew we could – and should – drop the illusion that we know best or could control the outcome. They knew that we might actually find peace if we could live into life instead of directing it.
Letting life live us, in my view, is not an act of faith. That implies that we believe the outcome to be as we want it. I think, though, it could be an act of trust. Trusting that life will bring us new experiences, insights, and perspectives – whether we like them or not – in the way that she always does. Trusting that we might actually find greater clarity and equanimity if we allow life to do her thing.
–
Sometimes we’re faced with what feels like a choice, and letting life live us means relinquishing the choice, at least for a while, until life keeps acting on us to make us ready to make it.
Sometimes we feel like we had no choice at all, that we were at the mercy of life’s whims, and letting life live us means befriending that reality.
Letting life live us isn’t an act of surrender. It’s an act of radical allowing. It’s patience in action. It’s hard. It’s humbling.
It’s the best kind of mystery.
Questions for Reflection
- Where are you struggling against letting life live you, believing that you need to direct the next step?
- In what area of your life do you find yourself trying to exert the most control?
- What would it look and feel like to lay down an important decision for a while?
- When is a time that life did something unexpected? How did it grow you?
