Sweet Surrender?

August 28, 2025

I had no plans to write this morning. Honestly, I was feeling lazy—or what I thought was lazy. But sometimes the most important realizations come when we least expect them.

I took Riley out for a morning walk. She's been struggling with walking lately, so we haven't been spending this kind of quality time together very much. We grabbed coffee, took a short stroll, and then made our way to one of my favourite spots overlooking the river.

Sitting here in the morning sun, I realized I may have hit a turning point in my creative recovery journey.

For so long, I've been trapped in the cycle of doing. Hustling, grasping, chasing, digging, rooting around, figuring, sorting, trying, thinking, processing. It's exhausting, and honestly? I'm not sure it's getting me any further along.

I'm so used to this way of existing—the tension, the hook, the pull, the anxiety. My whole system seems to be wired for grasping. But what am I working so hard for? I'm pulling so hard in a direction and I don't even know where I'm going. Sometimes I think I'm just pulling for the sake of feeling like I'm doing something.

So I'm trying something different. I'm experimenting with being instead of doing. And yes, it feels strange—almost lazy—definitely uncomfortable, but the other way certainly isn't working either.

This might be what surrender feels like. I'm trying to let go of all that familiar grasping and tension. I'm wondering: what if I just exist in this space and see what arises naturally? What if cool ideas emerge from this place of being, and then I use my intellect and organizational skills to build structure around them?

Instead of forcing, what if I trust?

Perhaps I'm fooling myself and I'm only running away from ideas I already have. Perhaps I just need to buckle down and take one of them to its logical conclusion. I do have some good ideas—or at least I think they're good.

But maybe they're not, and that's why I'm not working on them. I honestly don't know.

What I do know is that how I'm operating isn't working.

So for now, I'm allowing myself to just sit with these questions:

• What are the absolute must-dos to keep life running?

• What am I imposing through my will versus what wants to naturally emerge?

• How can I support this "being" without falling back into old patterns?

I started this creative recovery process three years ago, and although this feels like day 15,000 of this journey, I guess that's how recovery goes. It's a process, a spiral. Sometimes you feel like you're moving forward, sometimes like you're taking steps back.

Recovery isn't linear. Neither is creativity.

So for the next week, I'm committing to this experiment. I'm going to practice "being" as much as possible, release the grasping, and see what wants to come through.

I'll check back and see what actually emerges—if anything.

That's where I am today. I'm curious to see what happens next.

What does "being" versus "doing" mean to you in your creative practice? I'd love to hear about your own experiments with surrender and trust in the comments below.