It's About Surrendering and Listening

Why is it that we must often go to a place of complete bleakness before we can really get what we want in life?

Lately I've been puzzling over the inevitable, incredible power of 'hitting bottom' -- a place it seems we all must travel to sooner or later in the pursuit of our dreams. For some of us, that bottom feels like a tepid place; everything's 'fine' but nothing's really happening. We're dying a slow, psychic death, but there isn't a lot of twisting and writhing going on. Others, like the man I interviewed below, must lose everything they have before traveling out into the calm seas of true spiritual connectedness. They must suffer extreme loss and be stripped clean of everyday reality as they know it. Either way, there inevitably comes a day when we all must reckon with who we are, what we've created, and whether or not we will surrender to the greater spirit the guides us.

I recently read Stephen King's amazing account of being hit by a car, and his subsequent recovery. In less than two seconds, for no good reason at all, he was stripped of everything comfortable and ordinary about his life. His body was so badly injured that it took virtually every ounce of courage and stamina he had just to sit in a wheelchair and begin writing again, months after his trauma. The essay left us with no neat conclusions about why this had happened, but it made it clear that he still had his writing, and though his output has slowed, he is grateful for it.

I'm not sure why one must suffer at all in this life, but I know this: crises lead us, ever so humbly, back to the rich stuff of who we are and what is dear to us. They can be the portal to God, spirit, intuition, or whatever you see that great body of wisdom to be. And when the dust has settled, the bottom can leave you marveling at the smallest things, happy just to be alive as you finally get the joke.

It isn't what you do, necessarily, that creates the success or failure of your journey -- it's how well you listen, and surrender, along the way.