“It is the first thing any one has to learn in order to live,” Henry Miller wrote in comparing the art of living to dance, driven by rhythm into which the dancer must relax. “It is extremely difficult, because it means surrender, full surrender.” Surrender, it turns out, is an essential part of testing the limits, which is in turn an essential part of transcending them — in other words, the raw material of creative breakthroughs. But the beautiful term that Jeanette Winterson used to describe the experience of letting art transform us — “the paradox of active surrender” — applies just as aptly to the art of living itself: Paradoxical as it may sound, to stop resisting that which we cannot control is the only choice we have, but it is also one we must actively make in order to transcend our limits.

Maria Popova

“The paradox of active surrender” might almost be another name for the contemplative life itself. The conscious state of illumination (often referred to by Catholic writers as “contemplation” or “infused contemplation” – a different usage to “contemplative practice” as I employ the phrase here) is a gift. It cannot be achieved. It seems to me that intent needs simply to disappear in the practice of contemplation. How this is to be achieved is indeed a paradox: the falling away of purposive action isn’t an achievement at all. An achievement would be the result of purposive action. But nevertheless the absence of intent, replaced with a simple dwelling in the presence of what is, now, is the only sure way I know of becoming vulnerable and available to awakening, to open objectless awareness.

And yet surrender cannot help but be active in this context: one must intend to sit down, to be still – to surrender – even while one is relinquishing intent itself. The only response to such a paradox is simply unknowing: the embrace, the lingering, longing embrace, of what cannot be known, and yet is.