This essay explores the psychological and spiritual process of our ability to surrender, accept that which we cannot change or repair, and to mourn. This process stands in tension within us between the unconscious pull to relive things that went wrong, to relive them and attempt to do them right this time, and to heal ourselves through reparation. A contemporary perspective tries to break those binary models of mind and acknowledges that we live in constant tension between the wish to avoid and the capacity to bear the pain and losses that life brings. In this essay I explore the latter. When we surrender, when we accept that which cannot be changed or fixed, we touch an emotional truth that allows us to start mourning. That permission to grieve for our losses and faults connects us with life and welcomes the birth of new possibilities.