The Power of Now

Doesn't "surrender" sound a lot like losing?

At 29, Tolle had been struggling with anxiety and depression for a long time. One night he woke up with a thought on repeat: "I cannot live with myself much longer." Then it stopped him cold. "I" and "myself": was that one person or two? After that night, he says, he felt a peace he had never known. For the next two years or so he did almost nothing, often just sitting on park benches in London. His family thought he'd lost his mind.

He later turned the experience into this book, written as a long Q&A, as if a reader keeps pressing him and he keeps patiently answering. The first edition came out in 1997 from a small publisher in Vancouver. After Oprah recommended it in 2000, it took off, and it has sold more than ten million copies.

The whole book comes down to one line: almost all suffering comes from the mind resisting the present moment. We're either replaying the past or worrying about the future. Anywhere but here.

These are the images I keep coming back to:

Surrender isn't resignation. If you're stuck in the mud, Tolle says, surrender doesn't mean "Fine, I'll just stay here," and it doesn't mean pretending the mud is lovely. It means dropping the "this is terrible" label, accepting that yes, I'm in the mud right now, and then putting everything you have into climbing out. Action that starts from acceptance is far stronger than action that starts from anger or despair.

You only need to light up the next few steps. Picture walking alone on a foggy night with a bright flashlight. The fog is your past and your future. The flashlight is your awareness, and the small circle it lights is the present. You don't need to see the whole road. Just the next step.

"I don't care" is often resistance in disguise. This one stung. A lot of the time we think we've let go. We say "whatever," but there's resentment hiding underneath. Real surrender means honestly looking inside to see whether any resistance is still there.

The book is full of words like "Being" and "presence," and plenty of people find it too vague, or call it Zen in new packaging. My advice: don't get stuck on the concepts. Pick one image and use it for a week. There's one line I really agree with: going with the flow doesn't mean doing nothing. It means giving it everything and then not clinging to the outcome. To me, that's the best translation of this book.

Read it if you keep thinking you'll be happy once things get better.

Resistance is weakness and fear masquerading as strength.