Everything I have ever written or thought is unoriginal. Everything I have ever attempted has been attempted before, and will be tried many, many more times in the future by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. And often with better results.
This used to bother me immensely. Thinking like this would lead me into dark closets of inhibition. Why write this, or notice that, or say this, or try that if it has been done and can be done better? It never helped to hear others say, "Oh, Surya, what you just said/did reminds of blah blah blah person who said exactly the same thing a hundred years ago and blah blah blah famous person who is saying exactly the same thing right now in his latest book."
I'm less bothered now. Not because I feel I have some unique contribution to make to the world. But because the pain of inhibition is much worse than the pain of discovering that someone else out there is doing whatever I am doing, and much better. As I have been letting go of inhibition, I am actually finding that I am seeking out people who are doing things better than I am to be my teachers, if they'll have me. Better writers, better community organizers. Better poets, better runners. People who have wisdom. People who let me tag along and be a copy cat. People who give me an apprenticeship. People who take a risk on me, even if that means that I will defy them. People who are willing to risk that I might one day surpass them, but will teach me anyhow.
And so, with that small prologue, here are my uninhibited but completely unoriginal thoughts about the idea of taking risks and letting go, knowing fully well that there remains a lot to be learned from the greatest risk takers and letter go-ers of them all, of past and present. And also through the continuous act of living.
I think that taking risks and letting go is the only way to learn how to be alive. Yes, I may appear alive for all intents and purposes, blinking and breathing and all, cells dividing, hair graying, but I may not necessarily be living.
If you let go a little, you encounter this wonderful phenomenon called "sharing," which is the foundation for human civilization both in our evolutionary past and as we know it now. If we never learned how to share, we could not have developed cooperative societies. We would have no tribal groups. We would have no culture. We would have no systems of government, authoritarian or democratic alike. We probably wouldn't have learned how to talk either. Speech is a deeply reciprocal act born out of the need to share in one another's interests and communicate them effectively. I'd venture to say, if we hadn't learned to share, we would have never become human beings. I can go out and hunt some wildebeest alone and fail and be hungry or succeed and hoard the meat, but if I share in the action with others, we'll probably be more successful. It is in my interest that others in my group are well fed and happy-- because then they'll keep going out there to hunt and gather with me, etc. (You get my point). Much of collective survival depends on this ability to share in our interests and act upon them together.
So if you let go a little, you learn how to share, how to be a human being. But if you let go a lot, you might encounter something called... God? Dharma? Nature? Yourself? Emptiness? Nirvana? Since those are all pretty loaded and somewhat contentious ideas, I won't get into any of it, but instead just keep describing from my own experiences, which is all I really have.
About one month ago, I let go of my job. I wasn't let go. I didn't quit. I just let it go. I had taken enormous personal risks in taking the job. It hadn't existed before I got there, so I was in the creative act of inventing my work, with others. I didn't get paid a lot when I started, and I didn't get paid that much more when I let it go. I had actually envisioned myself working in that particular job for another 2-3 years, digging in long enough to help create a robust organization around my position, and then walking away when I felt like the work could continue on as I had envisioned it, without me.
In trying to create something that has never existed before, you have to gamble away a lot of what you know and what you see around you for something that isn't real yet, but could be. And you have to ask others to gamble with you. You gamble with money, relationships, time, trust, particular ways of organizing ourselves in roles and organizations. In our case, what we were gambling for was a community in Northeast Los Angeles where students of all walks could get a phenomenal education, where parents were powerful, where public education was less broken and more collaborative. Several schools came together to create my position, putting funds together for my contract so that I could begin my work as an organizer. We got as far as incorporating a nonprofit and our first few grants/donations. We got 15 schools together and hundreds of education stakeholders actively coming together across the usually divisive landscape of charter schools and traditional public schools. We tapped into people's appetites to build power.
And then, I let go. Not of the commitment I had. Not even of the work itself. But I let go of my particular way of coming at it, which meant I also had to let go of the paycheck. When I realized that I was asking people to gamble what they didn't have at the moment (time and money, most predominantly), there was no way to justify continuing to work the way I had been working. There was plenty of desire, plenty of solidarity. People were even willing to give me money they didn't have, and I was willing to wait around for it. But desire alone does not an organization make.
When I made the decision to let go, there were a few hours of free falling, a good deal of crying, some anger, some disappointment in myself and others. But slowly as the hours and days slipped by, the clouds kept parting and a few moments of peace and clarity would slip through. It was an inexplicable kind of clarity, even faced with the very real prospect of not being able to buy groceries or pay rent.
I think there is a little death that occurs inside of everything that is let go. And my courage to face death each time the moment comes is what teaches me to live.
Buddha knew this, and he had a great way of teaching this lesson. He brought his meditators to funeral pyres to watch bodies burn. He asked people to imagine their own bodies burning, or rotting in a grave, bloated, eaten by worms, turned into soil by thousands of little decomposing forces. Intellectually, it is not too difficult to grasp that I too will die, will rot or burn. But being willing to experience death in daily life is quite another thing. And it only comes about through practicing for death- by feeling with all your body that which is slipping away in each act of letting go.
Letting go means I have to be willing to not know what happens next. It means that things in my life that I have come to love and grow attached to will not exist anymore, or will exist in altered ways.
Knowing when to let go brings wisdom. I probably hung on to my job about 6 months longer than I should have. But it could have been worse. I could have clung to it for years and done a lot of damage to relationships, to trust.
I am lucky to have found a position now where I can continue a lot of the work I started with others, though in a different capacity. But I couldn't have known that with absolute certainty before letting go of my position. At some level, I just had to surrender.
The better I get at knowing when to surrender, the better the nature of my risk-taking becomes. Many worthwhile things I want to see in my life and the world around me require great risk. This is not to say that risk taking should be reckless. The opposite is in fact true-- anything worthy of the risk required to achieve it requires a great deal of consideration, of calculation. You should have a good enough sense of what will be gained by success or lost in failure. You should do a lot of research and ask a lot of tough questions of yourself and others. But then, you just have to be courageous and face the gaping chasm of what is left unknown, what is beyond your capacity to calculate. And jump!!!
People in love do this all the time. Parents often do this with their children. Entrepreneurs, inventors, organizers, writers, investors, all sorts of interesting people out there do this. I hope to one day be joining the ranks of the best out there, one risk and thousands of little deaths at a time.
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For those who haven't yet, take a risk! Please make a donation to my 1/2 marathon running efforts on behalf of AIDS Project Los Angeles!http://apla.convio.net/goto/surya
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