A Gentle Return to Trust – Part 4
For a long time, I thought trust and surrender meant something softer than they do to me now. I thought they meant relaxing my grip, trusting there was a divine plan for my life, and believing that if I aligned myself properly, the Universe would eventually deliver what I longed for in some beautiful and unmistakable form.
There was comfort in that belief, and I don’t want to pretend there wasn’t. When life feels uncertain, there’s a deep relief in imagining that something wiser than us is arranging every detail, every delay, every loss, every closed door, and every longing we carry.
And I still believe there is some truth in that.
But I’ve also come to see that we’re not quite as passive in the unfolding of our lives as we may have been led to believe. We may not control everything that happens to us, of course. Life has its own weather, its own timing, its own mysteries, and its own heartbreaks.
But we do have more influence than we sometimes imagine.
We have influence over what we continue to accept, what we finally allow ourselves to name, and what small steps we’re willing to take in the direction of a more honest life. We have influence over whether we keep abandoning ourselves for the sake of comfort, approval, or familiarity, or whether we begin, gently and imperfectly, to participate in our own becoming.
And perhaps this is one of the sacred gifts of a human life: that even as we are being shaped by our experiences, we are also being invited to shape the life that grows from them.
These days, I understand trust and surrender differently. Less as a promise that life will give me what I want, and more as a practice of trusting myself enough to take the next true step while releasing my demand that everything unfold exactly the way I imagined.
That distinction matters to me.
Because trust isn’t passivity. Surrender isn’t helplessness. And faith, at least as I understand it now, isn’t a reason to sit still and wait for life to rescue us from the very truths our intuition has been trying to show us.
That can be a tender and unsettling realization because it places us more firmly inside our own lives. It reminds us that we may have more work to do than we thought, but also more power than we remembered.
Where This Journey Has Been Leading
This series began with intuition because I believe that’s where any true return to ourselves must begin. Before we can change a life, we have to hear the part of us that knows something in that life is no longer aligned.
That knowing may arrive as uneasiness, resentment, longing, exhaustion, or a quiet ache we can’t quite explain. It may come as the heaviness we feel before walking into a room, the dread that rises before another workday, or the sadness that comes when we imagine nothing changing for the next five years.
At first, we may not know what to do with that knowing. We may only know that something in us has begun telling the truth.
So the next step became allowing. Allowing ourselves to stop dismissing what we feel. Allowing ourselves to name what is true, even if we aren’t ready to act on it yet. Allowing the truth into the room without immediately demanding that we have a complete plan for what comes next.
There’s mercy in that.
Because many of us have spent years abandoning ourselves the moment our truth became inconvenient. We learned to question our discomfort, soften our instincts, prioritize everyone else’s peace, and call our own longing selfish, impractical, dramatic, or impossible.
But once truth has been allowed into the room, something else often rises.
Resistance.
Not because we’re weak or foolish or unwilling to grow, but because truth asks something of us. It asks us to stop pretending. It asks us to stop handing fear the keys. It asks us to see the walls we’ve built between ourselves and the life that’s calling.
And then, finally, we arrive here.
At trust and surrender.
When Knowing Becomes a Choice
There comes a point when knowing is no longer enough. We can hear our intuition clearly, allow the truth to rise, and even recognize the walls we’ve built around it, but eventually life asks us a very simple and difficult question.
Now what?
This is where I think many of us get stuck. Not because we don’t know what we want. Not because we have no inner guidance. Not because the truth is unavailable to us.
We get stuck because moving toward what we know often requires us to live without a guarantee.
We want certainty before we begin. We want the full map, the clear sign, the perfect timing, the painless transition, and the promise that no one will be disappointed and nothing will fall apart. We want to know that if we take the step, the path will rise gently beneath our feet and carry us exactly where we hoped to go.
But life rarely works that way.
More often, we’re given just enough light for the next step and just enough discomfort to know we can no longer stay where we are. We’re asked to move before the whole path is visible, to begin before we feel fully ready, and to trust that clarity may come through action rather than before it.
That’s not easy.
Especially after 50.
By this age, we understand what change can cost. We know that one honest admission can ripple through a marriage, a career, a family system, a friendship, a home, or an identity we’ve spent decades building. We know that choosing ourselves is rarely as simple as inspirational quotes make it sound.
There can be grief in it. There can be guilt. There can be real-world consequences and practical considerations that deserve our care.
So trust and surrender after 50 can’t be about recklessness. It can’t be about burning everything down in the name of authenticity or leaping blindly because we’re tired of feeling stuck.
To me, it’s much more grounded than that.
It’s the practice of seeing the truth, taking the next honest step, and releasing the illusion that we can control every consequence before we’re willing to begin.
What I No Longer Believe About Surrender
There was a time when I thought surrender meant handing my desires over to the Universe and waiting for them to come back to me transformed into something better than I could have imagined. I thought surrender meant trusting that if something was meant for me, it would find me.
There’s still a part of me that loves the poetry of that.
But another part of me now sees how easily that belief can become another form of avoidance. It can sound spiritual while quietly allowing us to remain passive. It can keep us waiting for a sign when what we really need is a decision, a conversation, a boundary, a plan, or one small act of courage.
I no longer believe surrender means waiting for life to do our part for us.
I think surrender means doing our part with open hands.
It means making the effort, respecting our truth, showing up, taking the step, doing the work, and then releasing our grip on the exact form the outcome must take. It means trusting that our actions matter, while also remembering that life is larger, stranger, and less controllable than our plans.
That’s a harder kind of surrender because it asks more of us.
It asks us to participate.
It asks us to stop confusing trust with escape. It asks us to stop using uncertainty as a reason to do nothing. It asks us to stop measuring the value of our effort only by whether it produces the outcome we ordered.
And perhaps most humbling of all, it asks us to admit that the path may be working on us even when it doesn’t appear to be working for us.
When the Path Doesn’t Look Like the Plan
Again and again, life has shown me that what I want rarely arrives in the package I imagined. The answer may come through work I didn’t want to do, a delay I found maddening, a responsibility I initially resented, or a door I wouldn’t have chosen for myself.
For a couple of years after my Dark Night of the Soul, I thought financial stability would come through a sudden windfall because I was actively working to manifest it. I wanted rescue. I wanted relief. I wanted life to change dramatically without requiring much change from me.
But the stability I prayed for didn’t arrive that way.
It came through work, challenge, growth, competence, confidence, and the slow realization that I was far more capable than I’d allowed myself to believe. It came through a job that demanded more of me than I thought I could give and, in doing so, showed me a version of myself I might never have discovered otherwise.
That wasn’t the path I ordered.
But it was the path that changed me.
And this is where trust becomes complicated. Because if we only trust the path when it looks like the one we wanted, we’re not really trusting the path at all. We’re trusting our preference, our timeline, and our demand that life prove itself before we’re willing to soften.
I’ve done this many times.
I’ve stared so intently at the door I wanted life to open that I almost missed the one already standing open beside me. I’ve resisted blessings because they arrived disguised as effort. I’ve dismissed growth because it came wrapped in discomfort.
And I’ve mistaken delay for denial more times than I can count.
Surrendering the Demand
When I think about surrender now, I think about letting go of the demand that life unfold in the exact form, timing, and sequence I’ve decided would be best. Not letting go of desire. Not letting go of effort. Not letting go of hope.
Just the demand.
The demand that the dream arrive quickly. The demand that the path be efficient. The demand that the work feel easy because it’s aligned. The demand that fear disappear before we begin. The demand that every step prove itself immediately before we agree to take another.
Those demands can create so much suffering.
They make us impatient with slow growth and suspicious of ordinary effort. They make us believe nothing is happening when, beneath the surface, something important may be taking root. They make us overlook the quiet ways life is shaping us because we’re too busy waiting for dramatic evidence that our prayers have been heard.
But much of becoming is quiet.
A small decision. A private realization. A habit changed. A boundary spoken. A course taken. A page written. A conversation begun. A dream no longer dismissed as foolish.
These things may not look like transformation while we’re living them.
But slowly, they change the shape of a life.
The Power We Forget We Have
One of the most empowering things I’ve learned is that we’re not as powerless as we sometimes feel. We can’t control everything, of course. We can’t control other people, timing, loss, illness, disappointment, or the countless ways life can turn in directions we never saw coming.
But we’re not powerless.
We can choose what we continue to participate in. We can choose what we stop pretending not to know. We can choose whether fear gets the final vote. We can choose one small step in the direction of a more honest life.
That may not sound dramatic, but I think it’s where our true power lives.
Not in forcing life to obey our vision boards. Not in thinking the perfect thoughts. Not in believing so hard that reality bends itself around our desires.
Our power lives in the moment we stop abandoning ourselves.
This is a distinction I keep returning to in my own healing. In My Journey to Self-Love, I wrote about learning to stop treating myself as someone who needed to be corrected, diminished, or reshaped into acceptability. That same lesson lives here, too, because we can’t keep abandoning ourselves and expect to build a life that feels like our own.
At some point, we have to decide that our inner life matters. Our truth matters. Our longing matters. Not because every feeling is an instruction, and not because every desire should be obeyed, but because they are part of the conversation we’re meant to be having with ourselves.
That doesn’t mean everything is our fault.
It means more is within our hands than we once believed.
Trusting Ourselves to Meet What Comes
I think part of why we cling so tightly to control is because we don’t fully trust ourselves to handle what might happen if things don’t go as planned. We want certainty because uncertainty asks us to believe in our own resilience.
And many of us weren’t taught to do that.
We were taught to be careful, agreeable, practical, pleasing, prepared, and reasonable. We were taught to avoid mistakes, avoid disruption, avoid disappointing people, and avoid wanting too much. We weren’t always taught that we could make a choice, survive the consequences, learn from what unfolded, and choose again.
But we can.
That’s the quiet strength I think midlife begins to offer us, if we’re willing to receive it. We’ve lived enough to know that things fall apart and come back together in ways we never could have predicted. We’ve survived endings we thought would undo us. We’ve rebuilt after disappointments, losses, wrong turns, and seasons we didn’t think we’d make it through.
There’s evidence behind us now.
Not evidence that everything will work out the way we hope, but evidence that we can keep meeting life as it comes. Evidence that we can learn. Evidence that we can soften. Evidence that we can begin again, even when beginning again looks nothing like we imagined.
This, too, is trust.
Not blind optimism.
Lived evidence.
And perhaps this is why the work of releasing resistance after 50 matters so much. Resistance tells us we need certainty before we move, but lived experience tells us something else. It tells us we’ve already walked through uncertainty many times and found some version of ourselves on the other side.
Surrender Is Not Giving Up
I used to think surrender might make me passive, as though loosening my grip would mean I no longer cared. But I’ve come to see that surrender isn’t giving up on the dream. It’s giving up the belief that the dream must unfold exactly as I imagined in order to be worth following.
There’s peace in that.
Because when we release the demand, we become more available to the actual path in front of us. We become more willing to notice the opening that doesn’t match our plan, the lesson hidden inside the delay, the possibility tucked inside the disappointment.
We become less brittle.
And maybe that’s what trust and surrender are really trying to teach us. Not how to get everything we want, but how to walk through life with enough openness to recognize what is ours, enough humility to be changed by the path, and enough courage to keep moving when the next step is all we can see.
Because the next step may be enough.
Not forever. Not as a full life plan. Not as a guarantee that everything will unfold beautifully.
But enough for today.
A Gentle Return to Trust
When I look back over this series, I can see that each part has been a layer in the same quiet return.
First, we learn to listen. We remember that our intuition has been there all along, even when we were taught to doubt it.
Then, we learn to allow. We let the truth into the room, even when we’re not ready to act on it yet.
Then, we learn to recognize resistance. We begin to see the walls we’ve built from fear, doubt, unworthiness, and the need to control.
And finally, we learn to trust and surrender.
We trust the voice within us. We surrender the need for the whole map. We trust the next honest step. We surrender the demand that the outcome arrive in the package we ordered. We trust our longing enough to honor it, and we surrender the belief that wanting more means we’re ungrateful for what we already have.
This isn’t a fairytale kind of trust.
It’s quieter than that. More mature. More honest.
It doesn’t promise that life will become easy once we begin listening to ourselves. It doesn’t promise that every dream will come true or that every effort will bear the exact fruit we hoped for.
But it does promise something, I think.
It promises that when we stop abandoning ourselves, life begins to feel more like our own. It promises that even small steps can restore a sense of agency we thought we’d lost. It promises that the women we’re becoming are allowed to have a voice in the lives we’re still here to build.
And maybe, after 50, that’s the trust we most need to return to.
Not trust that something outside of us will finally hand us the life we’ve been waiting for.
But trust that the wisdom within us is real. Trust that our desires are worthy of our attention. Trust that fear can come with us without being allowed to lead. Trust that we can take the next true step, even with trembling hands and uncertain feet.
We may not know the whole way forward.
But we can know the next true thing.
And for now, that is enough.
