“Life’s a river. You can try and swim against it and you will get exhausted and stuck in the same place forever. If you let yourself be carried away by the stream you will hurt yourself and have no say in what happens. So learn to swim with the current, use its strength and power to go exactly where you need to be.”

For as long as I can remember my mother has told me this. Sometimes I understood what she was saying, sometimes I said I did, but I didn’t. I have done all three of those things in turns. I have tried to fit my life into vast ideas about how it should be, I have been overwhelmed and lost in life and there where times I had the courage to surrender and use my heart to navigate. The last has been the most difficult thing I have ever done. Surrender to life, lay yourself into it, onto it, give up resistance and still be so very present. Surrender is a bitch and something you really really really do not want to do. But the moment you want it more than anything, trust more than anything, be part of something greater and vaster more than anything, that is the moment – and sometimes it is just a moment – you let go and feel how beautiful and true that current is, and how capable you are of moving along with it, like riding a wave. Just that moment you know what you are looking for. And then of course I go back into resisting, struggling, stressing, you know, everyday life with stuff not going like you planned or imagined. Far away from surrender, but longing for it anyway.