Surrender

A week ago, on the TV show Big Bang Theory, one of the characters, in a drunken funk, leaves numerous messages on Stephen Hawkings’ answering machine.  This motivated me to look up the account by Eckhart Tolle of his first encounter of Stephen Hawking in a campus cafeteria when he was a graduate student at Cambridge University.  He noticed

A man in a wheelchair would sometimes sit at a nearby table, usually accompanied by three or four people.  One day, when he was sitting at a table directly opposite me, I could not help but look at him more closely, and I was shocked by what I saw.  He seemed almost totally paralyzed.  His body was emaciated, his head permanently slumped forward.  One of the people accompany him was carefully putting food in his mouth a great deal of which would fall out again and be caught on a small plate another man was holding under his chin.  Occasionally the wheelchair-bound man would produce unintelligible croaking sounds, and someone would hold an ear close to his mouth and then, amazingly would interpret what he was trying to say….

A few weeks later, as I was leaving the building, he was coming in, and when I held the door open for his electric wheelchair to come through, our eyes met.  With surprise I saw that his eyes were clear.  There was no trace in them of unhappiness.  I knew immediately he had relinquished resistance; he was living in surrender.

A number of years later when buying a newspaper at a kiosk, I was amazed to see him on the front page of a popular international news magazine.  Not only was he still alive, but he had had by then become the world’s most famous theoretical physicist… There was a beautiful line in the article that confirmed what I had sensed when I looked into his eyes many years earlier.  Commenting upon his life, he said (now with the help of the voice synthesizer), “Who could have wished for more?”