Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal

by Rachel Naomi Remen

How we were before we fixed ourselves to win approval.

WHAT WE DO to survive is often different from what we may need to do in order to live.

Over the years I have seen the power of taking an unconditional relationship to life. I am surprised to have found a sort of willingness to show up for whatever life may offer and meet with it rather than wishing to edit and change the inevitable.

Joy seems to be a part of an unconditional wish to live, not holding back because life may not meet our preferences and expectations. Joy seems to be a function of the willingness to accept the whole, and to show up to meet with whatever is there. It has a kind of invincibility that attachment to any particular outcome would deny us.

The willingness to win or lose moves us out of an adversarial relationship to life and into a powerful kind of openness.

The strength that I notice developing in many of my patients and in myself after all these years could almost be called a form of curiosity. What one of my colleagues calls fearlessness. At one level, of course, I fear outcome as much as anyone. But more and more I am able to move in and out of that and to experience a place beyond preference for outcome, a life beyond life and death. It is a place of freedom, even anticipation. Decisions made from this perspective are life-affirming and not fear-driven. It is a grace.

Freedom may be a stronger position than control. It is certainly a stronger and far wiser position than fear.

There is a fundamental paradox here. The less we are attached to life, the more alive we can become. The less we have preferences about life, the more deeply we can experience and participate in life.

I remember all the times that I too have resented the climb, the amount of living needed to gain the precious understanding to know how to live well. And how important it is in the struggle for freedom from the old ways not to be limited by style or self-expectations or to worry about what others may think.