The Art of Giving Up

That long, winding, uphill climb we all feel as just part of our life’s journey — to become a better person. You want to somehow cast out the darker aspects of your very nature, to rid yourself of all the nasty human things that you find unbearable. Why are so many of us climbing and struggling, stumbling and falling only to pick ourselves back up and continue our futile quest to venture outwards, further and further away from the treasure we hope to find? Even the most serene, joyous, and stable people have that little voice in the back of their minds saying that something isn’t quite right – "there’s something wrong with you." So you must put yourself through the most arduous trials of self-improvement to become this future idealised self before you can be happy. You hurt, and you don’t want to hurt. So you’ll do everything in your power to avoid the pains and therefore the pleasures of life. And as soon as you do that, you’ve abandoned yourself. You’ve abandoned the self that you set out looking for in the first place, forever moving away from who you really are because you think the person you were taught to be, the person people and society tell you to be actually exists.

This is the situation that many of us describe as the feeling of being trapped, or stuck, which arises from the futile endeavour to move away from the way you are in this very moment. Why do you turn your energy and attention towards the aspects of yourself that you can’t consciously change? Everything you do in order to be a better person could in fact be the reason why you feel the way you feel. If you have the power of focus and conscious attention, then why don’t you direct that energy towards the things that you actually want to see grow? In other words, if you focus on the belief that you need to be better, then all you’re doing is attesting to the fact that you believe you aren’t good enough already; you’re feeding your own sense of inadequacy further by desperately trying to transform yourself. Do this for long enough and with enough conscious focus then it will become habit and ultimately, a reality for you – a vicious circle and a trap of our own creation, for if the belief ‘I need to be a better person’ is our point of departure in life, then we may never fully depart and be who we truly are.

There lies at the root of this problem, one of the most destructive emotional states of all – guilt. You feel guilty because sometimes you hurt people, sometimes you let people down. And you believe that in order to receive love, you must be this idealised perfect person who is always unselfish; someone who always says the right thing and makes all the right decisions so that you can become worthy of love, connection, and acceptance. But whenever you try to do that, you’re just sending yourself the message that you aren’t good enough the way you are. Trying to be a good person, or an emotionally stable person, or someone who doesn’t feel anxious or depressed is an impossible standard that you’ll never be able to live up to because you’re a human being. To reject your own darkness is to abandon yourself and others in their darkest conditions – you become mixed up because you’re not all there. You inevitably find, however, that you can’t move in the direction of love as long as you’re departing from a place of guilt. To receive love is to be just that, even if it means learning to love the fact that there are things you don’t love and accept about yourself and the rest of the world by extension. To understand yourself and others is to forgive yourself but more importantly to trust yourself. Of course, you may make a decision which reaps disastrous results, but that’s okay as long as you’re not constantly worrying and shaming yourself instead of seeing what the mistake is teaching you.

You must realise that there’s nothing you can do to transform yourself and that giving up this pointless pursuit is to find the sense of relief you’ve been looking for all along. At that moment you’ll begin to direct that energy towards all the things you love because that’s precisely what you are. You trust your own nature and accept the fact that you can’t be a good person all of the time and you finally realise upon arriving where you’ve always been that it’s not you that’s capable of transforming yourself, but rather the journey itself and your experiences along the way. Not unlike all that exists in nature, you’re transformed by a force quite other than yourself. It’s not something you have to worry about willing into being. It just happens completely of itself. The moment you give up this quest to be a better person is the moment you truly arrive, through acceptance of your own darkness and thus deliverance from your sense of guilt. You don’t need to force your evolution. Just lay your arms down long enough for your nature to take its course. You’re not perfect and you don’t need to be, because you’ll always be good enough just the way you are now.