Living

I was listening to CBC Radio’s Q with Tom Power when I heard a line from Ahmed Moneka that made me stop and reflect: “If you don’t surrender to life, it will squeeze you harder.” I don’t know whether he intended those words to mean what they meant to me, but something about them immediately connected with my own journey. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how much of my life I had spent doing exactly the opposite of surrendering.

For most of my adult life, I believed that if something wasn’t working, the answer was to work harder. If I faced a challenge, I pushed through it. If I encountered an obstacle, I found a way around it. If I was exhausted, I told myself to keep going. I had built a career in IT around solving problems, and that mindset became more than a professional skill. It became the way I approached life itself. There was always another problem to solve, another responsibility to fulfill, another thing that needed my attention. I became very good at pushing through, but I wasn’t nearly as good at recognizing when pushing through was no longer helping me.

Eventually, life squeezed harder.

My burnout wasn’t a sudden event that appeared out of nowhere. It was the result of years of ignoring what my mind and body were trying to tell me. I was working long hours, sacrificing sleep, and convincing myself that I could keep going because I had always managed to do so before. I treated exhaustion as an inconvenience and rest as something I could postpone until the work was finished. The problem was that the work was never finished. There was always something else waiting for me.

I thought I was demonstrating strength by continuing to push forward. Looking back, I can see that I was also resisting something important: the possibility that the way I was living could no longer continue. I didn’t want to accept that the habits and identity that had helped me build my life were now contributing to my suffering. I knew how to work hard, but I didn’t know how to stop. I knew how to solve problems, but I struggled to accept that some problems couldn’t be solved by applying more effort.

When life began to squeeze me, my instinct was to squeeze back.

But life doesn’t always respond to resistance by becoming easier. Sometimes the harder we fight against reality, the more exhausted we become. We resist change because we want things to return to the way they were. We cling to relationships, careers, identities, and expectations long after they have stopped serving us. We tell ourselves that if we just try a little harder, we can restore the life we thought we were supposed to have.

Sometimes persistence is exactly what we need. But sometimes persistence becomes a refusal to listen.

That distinction changed the way I began to understand my burnout. I had spent so much energy trying to force myself back into the life I knew that I wasn’t making room for the possibility of a different one. I needed to stop treating my exhaustion as an obstacle to overcome and start recognizing it as a message I could no longer ignore.

And that required surrender.

I don’t mean surrender in the sense of defeat, helplessness, or abandoning responsibility. I mean surrendering the belief that I must control every outcome. Surrendering the expectation that I should always be productive. Surrendering the identity I had spent decades building around being the person who could handle everything. Most importantly, I had to surrender the idea that my worth depended on how much I could accomplish.

For someone who had spent much of his life being responsible, dependable, and capable, that was not easy. There is comfort in familiar identities, even when they become restrictive. We know who we are when we’re working, helping, fixing, and providing. But who are we when we stop? Who are we when the thing that once gave us purpose is no longer something we can continue doing in the same way?

I didn’t have immediate answers to those questions. What I needed wasn’t another plan or another challenge to conquer. I needed to give myself permission to stop fighting, to rest, and to allow life to unfold without demanding that I understand every part of it first.

My travels became part of that process, although I eventually realized that travelling itself wasn’t what cured my burnout. Changing locations doesn’t automatically change the way we relate to ourselves. We can carry the same anxieties, expectations, and habits across an ocean. What mattered more was the gradual realization that I didn’t have to force my way through every experience. I could let go of the need to have everything figured out. I could accept uncertainty. I could allow myself to be where I was without constantly demanding that I become something else.

In a strange way, surrender gave me back a sense of freedom.

I began to see that not everything in life needs to be controlled, fixed, or understood immediately. Sometimes we need to stop pushing against a closed door and consider whether there is another path. Sometimes we need to acknowledge that a chapter has ended rather than spend our energy trying to reopen it. Sometimes we need to admit that we’re tired, that we’re hurting, or that the life we’ve built no longer feels right.

There is courage in those admissions. They don’t make us weak. They make it possible for us to respond honestly to the lives we’re actually living, rather than endlessly fighting for the lives we think we should have.

I still have to remind myself of this. The old instinct to take control, solve the problem, and push forward doesn’t disappear simply because we have learned something new. There will always be moments when I want to force an outcome or rush through an uncomfortable experience. But now I try to pause and ask myself a different question: Am I working toward something that matters, or am I fighting to avoid accepting something I already know?

That question can be uncomfortable, but it can also be liberating.

Because surrender doesn’t mean that we stop participating in our lives. It means we stop believing that every part of life must bend to our expectations. We can still have goals, make decisions, pursue relationships, and work toward meaningful things. We can still take responsibility for what is within our control. But we can also recognize the limits of that control and learn to live with the uncertainty that remains.

Perhaps this is what I’m learning in this chapter of my life. I don’t need to fight every current. I don’t need to turn every difficulty into a test of endurance. And I don’t need to prove my strength by seeing how much discomfort I can tolerate before I finally allow myself to rest.

Sometimes strength is continuing. Sometimes strength is changing direction. And sometimes strength is simply opening your hands and letting go.

When I think about Ahmed Moneka’s words now, I hear a reminder that life often has ways of making us pay attention to what we have been ignoring. The pressure can build gradually, through exhaustion, frustration, disappointment, or a growing sense that something isn’t right. We can keep resisting those signals, or we can become curious about what they’re asking us to see.

I wish I had understood this earlier. Perhaps I could have spared myself some of the suffering that came from believing I always had to push harder. But even that thought requires a little surrender. I cannot change the years behind me. I can only learn from them and decide how I want to live the years ahead.

And perhaps that’s the real lesson.

Life isn’t always asking us to fight harder. Sometimes it’s asking us to listen. To loosen our grip. To stop insisting that we already know how everything should turn out.

Because if we spend our lives resisting every change, denying every limit, and forcing ourselves to keep going when something inside us is asking us to stop, life may eventually make the decision for us.

But we don’t have to wait until we’re broken to listen.

We can choose to surrender before the squeeze becomes unbearable.

Not to give up on life, but to stop fighting against it.

And perhaps, when we finally do, we discover that letting go isn’t the end of our journey.

It’s where a different kind of life can begin.