“The real thing that we renounce is the tenacious hope that we could be saved from being who we are.”

—Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart

Most of us have been waiting to be rescued from ourselves. Not dramatically. Just a quiet, steady hope that one day a better version of us will show up, calmer, wiser, finally fixed, and then life can really begin.

Chödrön calls that hope tenacious, and she says giving it up is the real work. It isn’t about giving up the world or pleasure. It’s about giving up the idea that who we are right now is a problem waiting to be solved by someone we haven’t become yet.

We know what this looks like. It’s every time we reach for something because we can’t stand to face what’s coming: the scroll, the plan, the next fix. When the world feels uncertain, the reaching gets louder. We’re trying to be saved for a minute.

Renunciation, the way she teaches it, isn’t punishment. It’s an invitation to stop jumping over ourselves and take a straight look at what’s here. She says that when we do, a kind of confidence in our basic sanity arises. Not because we got better. Because we stopped waiting to.