Be Still and Know

The Wilderness Is the Way — Part 4: Surrender the controls. The daily fight to stop white-knuckling your life.

Part 4 of a 5-part series on faith, grit, and the strength of character that only comes through hardship.

Often in life we’re taught to hold on. To push through, stay strong, and keep it all together. That can be good advice. But like a lot of things in life there should be nuance to it. Because it’s not just about whether we hold on. It’s about what we hold on to, how tightly we hold on, and whether we still know how to let go when we need to.

When we think of resilience often we think of standing firm. Taking the hits. Staying the course. And sometimes it does mean that. But I’ve spent enough time in the wild to know that gripping tightest doesn’t always mean we make it. Sometimes it means we’re the first to break. Because there’s a version of toughness that looks like strength from the outside but is actually just rigidity. And rigidity, in the wild and in life, is dangerous.

The wilderness of life has taught me a different kind of resilience. One that’s built on adaptability, not stubbornness. On moving smart, not just bullying through. On being willing to change the plan when the plan stops working, even when we’ve poured everything into it.

“Be like water making its way through cracks.” - Bruce Lee

That’s what this one is about. The daily fight to stop white-knuckling our way through life and start actually responding to what’s in front of us.

Bend Or Break

Toughness gets confused with rigidity a lot. We think the strongest thing we can do is dig in, hold our position, and push harder. But in the wild we learn very quickly that when we refuse to move on from plan A, we wear ourselves out. Every setback drains us a bit more and our movement towards our goal slows because we’re not adapting to the situation, we’re fighting it. And fighting conditions we can’t change is a battle we’re always going to lose.

But when we remember that plan A is just that, the first of many, and we look at what’s in front of us then failures stop being failures. Instead of being ground down by the setbacks, we get a fresh burst of energy from them. Because we’ve learnt some new intel about the mission and now we’re moving again. We’ve got a new angle, a new approach, and that momentum carries us further than grinding ever could.

Proverbs 16:9: ‘In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps.’

We plan. And we should plan. The planning matters. But God is the one who sets the actual path. And sometimes that path looks nothing like the one we drew up. And in those moments we have a choice. We can white-knuckle the original plan and exhaust ourselves fighting for something that’s already gone. Or we can trust that God is redirecting us, look at what’s actually in front of us, and find a new way through.

The one thing the Bible says God will always give us when we ask for it is wisdom. And I believe God speaks to us in those moments when we’re trying to find a way through. When plan A has failed and we’re looking for plan B. He’s right there in it with us. Sowing seeds of divine inspiration.

Failure Is the Road

Everything good in my life has come on the other side of something that felt like failure at the time.

The broken back that ended my military career led me to Everest. The expeditions that went wrong taught me more than the ones that went right. The moments when we have nothing left, no plan, no backup, no clue what to do next, those are the moments when we find out what we’re actually made of.

We’re so afraid of failure that we’d rather cling to something that isn’t working than admit it and try a different way. We cling to the version of life we’d mapped out. The role, the routine, the way we thought this year was going to look. Because changing course feels like going backwards. But in the wilderness, failure isn’t the end of the road. Failure is the road.

The setback is usually the setup. But we can only see that if we loosen the grip on control long enough to look around.

We don’t need to pretend failure doesn’t hurt. It does. Losing something we’ve worked for is painful. But we mustn’t set up camp in the pain either. Grieve it, learn from it, and start moving again. Treat failure as information, not as identity. It tells us what didn’t work. It doesn’t tell us who we are.

And here’s what I’ve found to be true, again and again. The fear of failure is almost always worse than the failure itself. We build it up in our heads into this enormous thing, this ending, and then when it actually happens we discover that we’re still here. Still breathing. Still capable of finding a new way through. The failure didn’t destroy us. It just changed the route. And often the new route turns out to be better than the one we’d planned.

The Mountain That Doesn’t Negotiate

When I climbed Everest I was 23 and we were on the mountain for 90 days. This had been a goal of mine for a long time, years of training and dreaming and preparing, and it all came down to sitting in a tent at Camp 4 in howling wind, waiting. Because the summit window isn’t up to us. The mountain decides when we move. And there is nothing we can do to make it happen faster.

Everything in us wanted to force it. Ninety days of build-up, years of work, and we’re just sitting there. Waiting. And the ego wants to say ‘right, we’re going, forget the conditions.’ But the mountain doesn’t care about our ego. Push when the conditions aren’t right and people die.

So we waited. We read the conditions as they actually were, not as we wanted them to be. We let go of the version of the summit push we’d rehearsed in our heads and stayed open to whatever the mountain was going to give us. And when the window finally came, we moved with everything we had.

All those years of preparation mattered. Without them we’d have had no chance. But the preparation only got us to that tent. What got us to the summit was the willingness to sit in the uncertainty, let go of the plan we’d built, and respond to what was actually happening.

But here’s the nuance. We weren’t going to sit in that tent forever. If the window hadn’t come, we’d have found another way. Changed the route, changed the timing, come back another year. We were waiting, but we were waiting actively. Watching, reading, preparing to move the second the opportunity came. And when it came, we didn’t hesitate. That’s the balance in all of this. Knowing when to hold and knowing when to move. Knowing when to stay on a plan and knowing when to adapt and find a different way through. Knowing when the conditions need more time and knowing when we’ve waited long enough and it’s time to commit. Nobody can teach us that formula because it’s different every time. But I think that’s where God’s wisdom comes in. When we ask for it honestly, we feel it. That nudge. That clarity. And then we go.

God’s Timing and Our Grip

Psalm 46:10: “Be still and know that I am God.”

It’s easy to read this and think “be still” means stop. Do nothing. Wait passively. That doesn’t sit right with everything I believe about effort and preparation and showing up.

In the context of what we’re discussing I think “Be still” means stop forcing. Stop white-knuckling the outcome. Do the work, absolutely. Prepare, plan, give everything you’ve got. But then release the result. Trust that God’s timing is better than ours, even when it doesn’t feel like it, even when we can’t see where it’s going.

And trust that when the plan fails, God is in that too. Every wrong turn, every setback, every closed door, He’s working through all of it. The failed plan isn’t God abandoning us. It’s God redirecting us. And when we learn to adapt and trust and keep moving, we end up looking back and saying: I couldn’t see it at the time, but that failure was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Proverbs 3:5 says it directly: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.”

Often our understanding is the thing we lean on hardest. Our ability to read a situation and predict what’s coming and plan our way through it. And God says: all of that is good, I gave you that ability, but don’t build your life on it. Trust me with the bits you can’t see. Trust me with the bits you can’t plan for.

There’s something deeply freeing about that. It doesn’t mean we stop working hard or caring about outcomes. It means we stop carrying the weight of things that were never ours to carry. We do our bit, and we trust God with the rest. Holding our plans with open hands. Doing the work with everything we’ve got, and then trusting God with the outcome.

The Daily Fight Worth Having

So how do we actually live this? Honestly, it depends on the day. And that’s kind of the whole point. Sometimes the right thing to do is to dig in, hold our ground, and push through with everything we’ve got. Other times we need to loosen up, read the conditions, and find a different way through. The wisdom is knowing which to do when. We won’t always get it right. That’s life.

Starting the day with prayer helps. Just a moment before everything kicks off to say thank you. Thank you for life. Thank you for today. It resets something. Reminds us that the day ahead isn’t something to force our way through. It’s something we’ve been given.

The wilderness of life is going to keep throwing curveballs. That’s not going to change. Our plans will fail. The path will shift. Things we were counting on will fall away. But every single time that happens, we have a choice. Grip tighter and wear ourselves down, or adapt, learn, and find a new way through. And every time we choose to adapt, we get fresh wind in our sails. Every time we let go of a plan that’s died and build a new one, we prove to ourselves that we can handle more than we thought. But that’s okay. Because we’re not the same people we were before the last setback. And the next one won’t break us either.

Never Give Up.

See you next week for Part 5: What Remains.

Bear

Coming up in this series:

Part 5: What Remains — Strip away the title, the money, the reputation. What’s left? What actually endures when everything else is taken away?