Letting go and finding flow

Sometimes words really do get in the way

I had my final session with a Reignite Your Creative Spark client this past week, and while we were checking in, the subject of surrender came up.

When I first encountered the concept of surrender, about 30 years ago, I was so baffled by it. I kinda-sorta got it… but I mostly didn’t. How the heck was I supposed to let go of control of stuff in my life and still be able to live it? How do you live a life if you’re not in charge of it? What the what??

In fairness to my younger self, surrender is a tough concept. It’s a lot like the idea of having to accept where you are in order to change it. We balk at that idea because we think accepting it means being okay with it, and we think that means we won’t want to change it. None of that’s actually true. By the same token, surrendering doesn’t mean we stop doing anything at all.

I’m convinced that half our problem with a lot of the concepts that would do us a lot of good in life is the vocabulary. More specifically, it’s our understanding of the vocabulary. I’ve realized recently that I have issues around certain words that get in my way. I wrote about one such case almost a year ago, when I looked at my struggle with the word “gratitude.” It grates on me in a way that “appreciation” doesn’t, even though they mean almost exactly the same thing.

Wallowing in gratitude

In much the same way, “surrender” is a word most of us immediately associate with giving up. Images of white flags and war movies spring to mind, and the overwhelming connotation is failure.

Nobody ever wants to surrender.

Especially not if it looks like this. Photo by Jackson Simmer on Unsplash

So why on earth would anyone welcome the idea of surrender in any context? In defense of my younger self, it’s really pretty reasonable to look at the idea and decide that the whole thing is pretty batty and get back to whatever it was you were already doing.

What came to me as I was listening to my client, and synthesizing her comments with some recent musings of my own, was this:

The concept of surrender is tough for us because it feels like we’re being told to give up control, and that sounds crazy. But if we think of it instead as an invitation not to have to worry about this particular thing right now… boy, that feels a whole lot better. Now we don’t have to try to control it. It’s not our problem anymore. We can just let it be the way it is and be with it the way it is.

That’s a radically different thing. I’m gonna take a wild guess that you can feel that difference in your body. The first way of thinking about it makes you feel all tight and constricted inside, and the second feels much more open and free, or something along those lines, at the very least. Probably some part of you relaxed when you read the second version.

So what the heck has this got to do with your creativity/creative process? A couple of things.

First of all, the way you think about things matters. My struggle with the negative (for me) connotations of the word “gratitude” is solved by replacing it with “appreciation.” That’s a pretty easy fix. “Surrender” isn’t quite so simple—it requires a different way of thinking about it instead. A “reframe,” if you like the current terminology.

Whatever you call it, the decision to stand on your mental head to get a different perspective on an idea can really shift things for you. When I think of surrendering control as a way of not having to worry about something for a while, I’m all for it! It feels like I have permission to let go (the fact that we feel like we need that permission in this messed up culture is a whole other topic for another day). And it makes me wonder where else I can do that.

Surrendering control of a creative project can mean we decide it’s not up to us to come up with a solution to a particular problem right now. We get to go do something else instead, or move on to a different piece of the project for a while and let the first bit percolate in the background. Heck, we may find out, after some time away, that it wasn’t actually a problem at all—but there’s no way to find that out if we assume it’s a bedevilment and keep slamming our heads into it instead. All we get if we keep doing that is a nasty headache and possibly a bloody mess to clean up. Who wants that?

On a side note here, I personally am not convinced that we’re ever totally in control of a creative project—or much of anything else—in life anyway. I think things come through us at least as much as from us, at least in the creative realm, and getting too caught up in our own role in the process is often what gets in the way and ultimately ends up leaving us stuck. If we can think of ourselves as the conduit through which our work comes to life, it can be easier to get out of the way and let it be what it wants to be rather than trying to force it to be what we think it should be. Getting out of the way opens us up to that miraculous state we call flow and pre-empts at least some of the stuckness.

Photo by Susan Wilkinson on Unsplash

There’s a magic in that flow state that we often struggle to articulate. Whole books have been written about it, most notably by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (whose name I would tell you how to pronounce if I could do that reliably in text—I was so thrilled when I heard someone say it and realized it’s not as hard as it looks!). It sounds really patronizing to say that the secret to getting there is to get out of your own way, but that’s a big piece of it—and here’s where we circle back to letting go of the need to worry about the outcome.

As I’ve said before, if you’ve ever watched young kids play, you may have noticed that one thing they rarely do is get hung up on the result. They’re in it to play, not to win a Nobel Prize, so their concept of control is very different than an adult’s. (I’m talking young kids here—I’ve seen perfectionism start to set in as young as six, which is appalling, but welcome to our crazy culture.) As a result, they drop into flow much more easily, and adapt to what happens more readily—which is part of how improv works, as we discussed last week. Result? They don’t get blocked like adults do.

Get Your Improv On

Next time you find yourself getting stuck on a project, take a second to see what your body feels like. If your gut feels like someone’s tangled it up in knots, walk away for a bit, maybe get a cup of tea or take a literal walk outside, and then when you come back, try it from a place of surrender. Don’t give up—no need for the white flag—but do let go of your need to control it. Give it a chance to be what it wants to be instead. Let it show you what it is rather than forcing an identity onto it.

At the very least, go forward secure in the knowledge that figuring it all out isn’t your concern right now, and that you’re free to work on something else while your project gets on with showing you what needs to happen next.

And it will! 😉

I’ll leave you with a musical reminder of this principle—a catchy little tune that will, perhaps, pop into your head when you most need something to help you remember to let go and let it flow instead.

I hope you’ll tell us below about a time when something you were working on showed you that it was actually something different than you expected it to be. How did that happen for you, and how did it turn out?