Contradictions have always existed in the soul of [individuals]. But it is only when we prefer analysis to silence that they become a constant and insoluble problem. We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison.

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, Part 2

One of the striking effects of long-continued practice is the discovery that the continual churning of thoughts need not be addressed, need not even be opposed or counteracted. Questions need not be answered; contradictions need not, as Merton saw, be resolved. Ultimately, there doesn’t even need to be a conscious letting go (as in centering prayer): all that needs to be done is to observe, very gently, the arising of a thought, the impulse to respond, but softly to return to the breath, to the sound of a distant train passing in the cutting under the bridge, another breath…

There is such a dear freshness in this kind of silence, in the very simplicity of it, the ordinariness of what is. Susan Blackmore writes that on retreat in the Welsh mountains once,

I remember sitting there one evening with a group of other novice meditators, struggling to get comfortable, sitting cross-legged on my cushion and looking down at the bare wall in front of me in the standard Zen fashion, when [the retreat director] said that our minds should be so calm that we would hear a woodlouse crawling across the floor. Somehow this stuck with me and I wanted to be able to hear that woodlouse.

Listening to woodlice: that’s all it is about, really, in one sense. The quiet step of a woodlouse walking across a wooden floor in Wales, the Bristol train rumbling under the bridge just down the road here, the rise and fall of my chest, this year’s robin trying out his song. This is enough; what else could there be?