SELF-SURRENDER

Ours is a society based on winning. From sports competition to political elections, from checkers to chess, as football coach Bear Bryant put it, "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." With such a strong cultural bias on achievement, how can we understand the Chinese saying that "less is more"? Yet if we think about our life, we may see that being assertive, aggressive or competitive does not always give us a sense of fulfillment or peace. We often feel the deepest and most profound fulfillment precisely when we surrender and let go of our need to control and shape things to our own ends. While, at times, we do feel the need to be in charge of our life, there are other times when a much greater freedom comes from simply letting. Some of our greatest breakthroughs in life come when we simply surrender.