Imagine yourself in this situation…

It’s a beautiful day and the sun is slowly descending upon the horizon as you’re driving into the National Park late in the afternoon for a fun weekend camping trip. You realize as you’re driving past the ranger station that it closed a half-hour ago, and so you won’t be able to buy any firewood -- no worries, you can probably scrounge enough up around the campsite to make a small fire. You find the campground is fairly wet from the previous day’s rain, and slowly hacking away at felled branches to make firewood is slow-going with your dull hatchet, and the damp wood will barely light. It’s getting cold, and you start setting up the tent while you try to let your food cook over the measly fire. Then the downpour starts. You manage to mostly get the tent set up in time, and retreat to the car to sit in your soggy clothes and eat your cold sausages that the pitiful fire barely touched with heat (the fire is non-existent now). Your dry clothes are in the trunk, but getting out of the car to get them would probably yield a net-zero effort in the “getting dry” department. The storm eventually passes and you go to the tent to find you hadn’t put up the rainguard, and you now have a small swimming pool with a few inches of standing water to sleep in. Of course you had left some of your warmer clothes, now swelled up with rain water, in the tent. On the bright side, the weight of the water in the tent will keep it from blowing away in the howling wind. And that’s when the rain picks up again. It’s late, you’re soaking wet and tired and hungry and don’t have a tent to sleep in and you’re in the middle of nowhere. And this is the time when the bravest decision of all is to surrender.

After all, what else are you going to do? Kick dirt and scream at the sky? There are times when surrendering is the most courageous and productive choice of all. Surrender tends to get a bad reputation: it’s cowardly, it means defeat, shows weakness. But that’s anything but true. Surrendering doesn’t have to mean giving up. To surrender is to focus. It is a choice in how you’re going to direct your energy. Is your vitriol towards the inclement weather going to change anything? Is your disappointment in the lacking flammability of damp wood going to start a fire? Is frustration with showing up to the campsite late and forgetting to put the rainguard on the tent going to change the course of what’s already happened?

It’s an act of courage, in these times, to step back and laugh at it all, surrender to the decisions that have already been made and the circumstances that are out of your control. It is an effort in focus and intention. It is paring down the burdensome and unnecessary to redirect towards the controllable and meaningful, and that’s downright empowering.

You don’t control the outcome; but you do control your thoughts and behaviors. It’s okay to surrender sometimes.

- PS

1/15/18

• Front squat - 3rm

Then...

• For time:

• 50 thrusters (95/65)