A friend of mine, a practiced traveler—the sort who always has a packed carry-on ready to roll, and who always manages to look both polished and perfected at the airport—confessed to me recently that she used to deal with severe travel anxiety.
As she told me practices that had helped her—locating quiet spots away in the terminal, packing techniques, meditations—she mentioned one that caught me by surprise. “Whenever the airplane hits turbulence,” she told me, “I repeat quietly to myself, ‘I don’t need to do anything.’”
I found this delightful, and astonishingly resonant.
Because of course you don’t need to do anything during turbulence. You actually can’t do anything during turbulence, except make sure your seatbelt is on. And yet—at least for anxious travelers—the body seems not to know this. The muscles tense. The jaw clenches. The brain scans the environment for something to do. Questions emerge. Does the pilot even know this is happening? Is this normal? Should I—
Should I what? Go hop in the cockpit and take care of it myself?
I adopted my friend’s phrase, and I am surprised to see how meaningful it is across so many different contexts. Stuck in traffic? I don’t need to do anything. Irritated by a work frustration out of my control? I don’t need to do anything. Worried about something that may or may not happen in the future according to factors out of my influence? I don’t need to do anything.
To let go is not a passive act. It is active, and at times painful.
I always found myself surprised, during yoga, to realize the extent to which I had to ask my body to calm down. Even flat out on my back on the floor, things clench up: hands, jaw, back, shoulders, neck. To relax is an act of engaged will. To rest is to unclench, undo, unravel. My body assumes it is always in control, as I assume I always am in control, or ought to be, or need to be.
A circumstance has come up, recently, which threatens to change my life significantly.
I write “threaten” because that is how my mind views it. The circumstance is actually an opportunity for me, a “this might be cool” possibility. It might be a God thing. I say this because it dropped into my life out of a series of other circumstances I was unaware of and could not predict, and not out of any choices I made. I say this because all the key players in my life who know me and love me are providing encouragement to pursue it. I say this because every time I look for a red flag to slow me down I see a green one waving.
And yet I do not want this. I view this opportunity as an interruption. A problem. A concern.
Not because it’s bad, necessarily: because it’s change, and I view change as a threat. Because I have a sense of how my life is supposed to be and to go and this ain’t it. Because I know what “leadership” and “growth” look like, and how I expect them to play out, and although this meets both criteria it is also not what I planned or asked for or desired. Because I want to be comfortable and know how things are going to go.
God has never once worked that way in your life, my brain whispers, and I feel a little sick to my stomach.
So I try to game out possibilities. I draw out elaborate scenarios: if I try for x, and it happens, what might the result be, and how will I handle it, and how will everything go? If I don’t attempt y, does that mean I can try xyz down the line, and how will that impact all these other things? I get twitchy trying to control for every factor; I strive to make decisions that will only result in the things I want and expect; I do and push and wonder and ask and stew and think.
When the truth is, per my friend: I don’t need to do anything.
I mean, I can do some things. I can ask if the opportunities ahead of me are sound, and in alignment with God’s will for me as I understand it. I can ask for wise counsel from the people who know me and love me. I can bring matters to God in prayer. But then I can either choose to go for the opportunity or not, and after that I don’t need to do anything. I can relax, let the chips fall, and trust God will guide. Which means, for me, actively and perpetually disabusing myself of the notion that I can or should control the outcomes of my own life.
This is one of the hardest practices of faith.
I used to believe, when I was younger, that getting God’s will right was a matter of making the right choices: the right job, the right spouse, the right house, the right neighborhood, the right career. I do believe God gives us guidance on these paths; I also believe that we can have a clear sense of when things are good or not good for us. But I believe we can sometimes place too much importance on our own choices, on our own ability to control what God does for us or how He shows up.
So many choices in life are a both/and, or an either/or, after all.
Maybe Jobs A, B, and C are all pretty good. Maybe Career Path X and Y could both be great. Maybe I could live happily in three different areas. The concern here is not with making the right choice but in remaining God-centered in the choosing: staying close in prayer, practicing faith and obedience, and trusting that we don’t need to do anything because God will do everything. Letting Him tend to the details while we control our trust, faith, and submission.
On an airplane, I’m a passenger. I don’t need to know what altitude the plane is flying at or what the weather is or whether there will be turbulence. My body is required to do nothing other than sit in the seat and be ferried along, trusting to the expertise of those in the cockpit.
And so with the Christian life. I can choose to get on a plane, or follow an opportunity. I control the steps I take and the seat I choose. But once I’m in, the journey is no longer my own. I have to trust to the expertise of the pilot; I relax in the seat; I recognize that I am in good hands.
It is the hardest, and the best parts of faith. Sometimes relaxing is the greatest challenge set before us.
Samaritan's Song 