Surrender?

I've been thinking a lot about a comment that Lisa CK left after my "Keep Kicking" post.

"Don’t confuse surrender with passivity. Passivity does not involve the intentional choice that surrender does."

I've always thought of surrender as a negative action, an admission of defeat. My birth date, August 15, is also the day that the Japanese surrendered, officially ending WWII in the Pacific. Depending on your viewpoint, that surrender was either an intentional choice that no doubt saved the lives of tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers and civilians or it was a shameful admission of defeat.

It's interesting to me that very few Americans know that date, but I'll bet that 90% of Japanese can tell you the significance of August 15. The Japanese women in our San Gabriel neighborhood never forgot my birthday because of its link to V-J Day.

I'm still not sure how I feel about making the conscious choice to surrender and in what circumstances I would consider it a personal victory. But I do know this: the hardest part of surrendering is giving up control, something that, in case you haven't noticed, I'm reluctant to do.

Is it any wonder that when I look back at that live-saving surf episode, I regret not kicking my legs. Participatory kicking would have given me the allusion that I had some control over the situation.

My regret should have been that I didn't ask those two lifeguards, "Is there anything that I can do to help you?" Something tells me that they would have answered, "Just hold on" or "Enjoy the ride." Then I could have surrendered in their arms and remained regret free a quarter century later.

(I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on surrender. Have you ever surrendered? What were the circumstances? What was the outcome?)