I’m letting go now, my friend. I give in.

I welcome you to give in, alongside me.

I cannot hold on a moment longer to anything needing to be a certain way.

I cannot perfect these costumes life has asked me to wear, nor can I master these roles I’m asked to play.

Any posture is too much to hold and every mask has to come off.

I cannot continue to indulge these unresolved dichotomies within me: good and bad, beautiful and ugly, success and failure, holy and profane, loveable and unloveable.

May they all burn to ash in the fire of my own radical embrace.

I’m giving up now on being anything other than myself.

And if I’m going to be loved and hated for being myself, so be it.

And if I’m going to be mocked and scorned, worshipped and adored, praised and judged, it’s really none of my business.

Truth is my only business.

I cannot entertain another recycled thought of wishing this instant would somehow be other than it is; of arrogantly thinking life must have gotten it wrong somehow to be so agonizing for so many.

What delicious reprieve when we finally stop trying to control the uncontrollable and really let it all just be as it is.

I don’t mean to suggest we should stop praying for the world to come to peace, or halt our efforts as agents of necessary change.   (Please don’t!)

I’m in no way implying that apathy could bear fruit, or that complacency might catalyze our essential liberation as individuals or as a species.

All I’m saying is that our habitual struggle against life as it is, is one of the basic, insidious ways we contribute to suffering— inside our own lives, and life as a whole.

Let it be a fucking catastrophe! Let it be a wonder!

Let it be the excruciating journey that brings us to our knees time and time again, begging for mercy—

That wakes us at 3:00 a.m. with pounding hearts of anxiety and prayer, aching for our children, for our world—

That stops us in our tracks and makes us gasp out loud to witness such ineffable, stunning BEAUTY—

That makes us laugh so hard in moments we are at once crying and trying not to pee in our pants!

This life that humbles us over and over and over again, teaching us about gratitude, about resilience and evolution; teaching us about remorse, and faith and forgiveness; teaching us about the infinite faces of grace.

I’m giving up on it ever getting better than this.

I’m breaking up with the illusion that “awakening” or “fulfillment” or “success” or some long-awaited cause for “ecstatic contentment” is coming in some future moment.

I’m giving up on life, love, work, parenthood, sex, family, partnership, or adulthood ever meeting any of the idealized fantasizes I’ve projected onto them.

Dare we know that peace comes as we stop searching for it; stop waiting for it to look different than this, right here, right NOW?

Dare we claim this moment as the one when we completely lean in and finally say YES to it all, just as it is?

What a relief to let this life BE the intensely mixed bag it IS—the gutting anguish and the grandeur all mixed up in one barely palatable bite; a bite that we continue opening wider to receive because we are alive for but an INSTANT, so we might as well show up for it!

We might as well live with our naked hearts exposed, in fearless and generous surrender, for all the world to taste of.

We might as well give everything to Love.

~*~ Jesua