Twelve thousand feet up on a Himalayan mountain, in a basic tealodge with no heat, I sat there on the wooden bench freezing my ass off, and pretty angry about how miserable the cold was making me. 

Anyone who knows me knows I vehemently hate feeling cold. I hate it in every fiber of my being. So why go trekking, you might ask? Where being cold is part of the deal? 

Because when else am I going to have the chance to go trekking in the Himalayas? Sometimes you do things just to say you did them! 

Anyway. The trek up to Mardi Himal, a four or five day hike that takes you up to 4200 meters (roughly 14,000 feet) wasn’t all that exciting in terms of weather. Most of the time, we were socked in by fog and clouds and, on occasion, rain. Only once did we see a glimmer of one of the massive seven peaks this trek is famous for. The previous weekend, I hiked up to Khumai Danda (a two-day trek that takes you upt to 3,800 meters (12,000ish feet)), and had similar conditions. Couldn’t see a single mountain. Talk about a disappointment – weatherwise, anyway. The people I spent time with on this hike, a couple from the Netherlands and a fellow from Australia, were lovely; we shared many wonderful moments together playing cards, chatting about life and where we’ve traveled to and what led us to Nepal, and commiserating in the pain (physical and emotional) of hiking up hundreds of steps into thick clouds. 

The staggering scenery we did see that surrounded this hike wasn’t bad, either. You feel small when you’re up that high, and it’s impossible not to feel emotional about the grandiose of it all. 

But back to me being miserable and cold:

I was shivering. I was regretting my life choices. And I was wondering how I was going to enjoy the next two days if all that awaited us as more cold the higher up into the mountains we got. Nothing about this was enjoyable.

At this moment, a word popped into my mind: Surrender. 

Surrender to the cold, it said. Surrender and let it be. 

Fine, I snapped, as if it bothered me that I hadn’t realized this sooner. I relaxed my body, tense as it was, and I took a breath. I did this a few more times until the clenching in my belly released. Almost instantly, the violent shivering subsided and the coldness that had seeped into my bones settled, becoming a part of me instead of a separate entity I was fighting against. And while I still wasn’t comfortable, I wasn’t uncomfortable. My mood shifted, now that it had room to, and leaned into the notion of letting it be. 

Since then, that word has stuck with me. Surrender. On the way up to the viewpoint where there was no view and the cold was so intense that my fingertips turned blue. On the way down that felt like it took forever. When my mind begins to panic about where to go next, where I’ll be in a year, in ten, if my book will get published, if I’ll run out of money, if, if, if… 

I have spent much of my life gripping tightly to how I think things should go. Even in my efforts to dispel many of those “shoulds,” my fist is clenched tight. And when things turn out differently than how I saw in my head, I spend a lot of precious energy fighting against this unexpected or new outcome instead of accepting it, surrendering to it. 

Like my experience in Nepal, for example. It’s gone differently than I thought it would – neither good nor bad, just different. But for some reason, my brain wants to shame my experience, turn it into something bad that I caused because I didn’t do something well enough, or I didn’t plan enough, or I wasn’t outgoing enough… and on and on. My experience here has been what it is. Have I had fun? Yes. Have I struggled? Mightily. Have I learned and grown and felt transformed through it all? One hundred percent. So for all of that, I am trying to lean into what my time here has been and let it be without sizing these experiences against arbitrary measurements such as positive or negative. 

I think if we can learn how to surrender to what life brings our way, we will be more open to what it’s got laid out for us. We will have an easier time being present because, instead of fighting against whatever is going on, we can accept it and let it flow in and through us. If you’ve ever done yoga, the instructor will often say something to the effect of: “just observe, don’t judge” to whatever feelings come up as you try and stretch yourself into a pose that wants to snap your hamstring tendon in half. And those words have never rung truer for me. Observing what is happening inside and around me allows me to stay curious and, in some ways, detach from the experience – not in a way that makes me shut out what is going on, but in a way that gives me some distance and space to see what is really going on. It’s the path of least resistance.

I am grateful that this word came to me when it did, and in the moments when I can slow down enough to apply it to whatever I’m facing, I notice instantly how calm my brain and body are. How much less powerful my emotions are, and how much more control I have over my thoughts. Our thoughts determine much of our reality, so having agency over them is paramount to the kind of experience we have in this life.

Surrender. What does that look like for you?