Today’s post is an excerpt from my most recent book, Circuit Train Your Brain. Once in awhile, it’s recommended that you let your brain roam a bit outside the traditional boundaries where it spends most of its day. This chapter excerpt occurs a little over halfway through the book, which is written as a day-by-day habit changer. Let’s see where it takes us today.

Your ability to imagine is one of the most underutilized powers we humans have. Everyone from sports heroes like Serena Williams and Michael Phelps to actors like Jim Carrey and Oprah Winfrey harness the power of visualization and imagination to develop resilience and fuel their future.

Here’s a mind-bender poem you can reference for today’s exercise:

Join death
to your life and you will live
as if there were no drum to march to.

There is no march at all.
You’re done. All will be well for all.”
—from All That’s Left, Jack Hirschman

This chapter is pretty “woo woo” and “out there,” but if you’ll bear with me, I think you’ll enjoy the detour. Over the past year, the idea of surrender as liberation has been bouncing around my head; I don’t know where this will all end up. So if you’ll bear with me, let’s take a trip down the rabbit hole together.

Paradox is one of my life lessons that I’m supposed to figure out as I navigate my journey. It took me about 37 years to realize that fact, but since then, I’ve been practicing awareness of paradox for a few years, so it has become easier to recognize when I encounter it. Most of the time, paradox is one of those ‘hmroo?’ concepts—the truth of which is tucked in so deeply to the problem that the solution (or resolution) dangles *just* out of reach of our consciousness.

The really frustrating part is that once the tumblers do click and you can comprehend the inherent paradox of whatever specific problem with which you are dealing, it is maddeningly difficult to explain to someone else. It’s usually a lesson that is intensely personal. You just *know.*

How can we die yet live?

In the case of the poem’s excerpt above, how does dying to our life free us? Is it freedom from expectations? Is it freedom from earthly concerns? Is it allowing us to focus on eternal matters?

Most people (including Yours Truly) are more comfortable with clear cut beginnings and ends. For example: Articulate goal. Write it down. Take steps to achieve it. Achieve stated goal… and finally (in football parlance), move the chains. Repeat as necessary.

However: what if linear and nonlinear paths coexist simultaneously? What if the linear model of goal achieving outlined in the previous paragraph is absolutely correct? What if a random pathway would bring you to the same end? Is one approach more real or correct than the other? What if your path is at once independent and interrelated to every other path? What if all of the above are true? Would it matter?

As I see it, our responsibility to ourselves and each other is to tend our own garden. Set our own goals. Discern our own truths and live them out as best we can with what we have at any given time, reaching out to others who are able and willing to help us grow. In so doing, the betterment of the Whole is advanced.

When we focus on our own skills, talents and the expression of same, we find that our lives are like an instrument playing within a symphony of humanity. Each life has a different tone, frequency, vibrancy and melody and yet each blends with the others when lived in an authentic manner.

There is no march at all.

This sentiment is inherently annoying to most of us, because it represents the opposite of all we hold dear: there must be some meaning to this, right? Because if there’s not, then why are we here?

It doesn’t matter.

Boing! That’s the point at which my brain usually breaks (or at least stretches a little). Perhaps the scale of existence is so big that it’s beyond our comprehension. Perhaps the realization of our ability and capacity to opt out of expectations is, in and of itself, the goal. Perhaps that’s an enlightenment of sorts. One truth of which I am certain: embracing the paradox of surrender is liberating. There is a subtle difference between surrender and giving up.

Surrender is an acknowledgement that you’ve reached the limits of your comprehension. Giving up is not looking any farther. Once we surrender, we are open to new horizons; and that’s where our independence lies.

Thanks for sticking with me, and please share your thoughts below.

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