Tag Archives: Maria Popova

The paradox of active surrender

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“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.

Losses

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We dream of immortality because we are creatures made of loss — the death of the individual is what ensured the survival of the species along the evolutionary vector of adaptation — and made for loss: All of our creativity, all of our compulsive productivity, all of our poems and our space telescopes, are but a coping mechanism for our mortality, for the elemental knowledge that we will lose everything and everyone we cherish as we inevitably return our borrowed stardust to the universe.

And yet the measure of life, the meaning of it, may be precisely what we make of our losses — how we turn the dust of disappointment and dissolution into clay for creation and self-creation, how we make of loss a reason to love more fully and live more deeply.

Maria Popova

I have long felt that losses, not only the losses inherent in mortality, but the little everyday losses that go with being human and alive – the loss of times past, of old haunts one may never revisit because they are not the same any more, the loss of old lovers, of once treasured possessions, of whole phases of life that cannot now be relived – are no more and no less than the fabric of meaning itself. They are the juicy realities that life is actually about, just as much as the joys of being alive and the wonders of illumination.

Richard Norman, in his excellent new book What is Humanism For?, quotes Martin Hägglund:

Far from making my life meaningful, eternity would make it meaningless, since my actions would have no purpose. What I do and what I love can matter to me only because I understand myself as mortal. … The question of what I ought to do with my life – a question that is at issue in everything I do – presupposes that I understand my life to be finite. … If I believed that my life would last forever, I could never take my life to be at stake and I would never be seized by the need to do anything with my time.

One loss we can never avoid is that of our own life, sooner or later; for many people this is in itself an appalling prospect, and yet it may be in the end the only thing that makes life – our one and finite life – worth living. Death, as I’ve written elsewhere, is no enemy, but the truest friend we have:

Death is an old friend. To dissolve in the end into simple light, the plain isness that underlies all things and yet is no thing: what is there to fear? Death follows us, yes, but he is our own death; dear, familiar, kind, and faithful.

Perhaps it is good to make friends with death for ourselves: to greet him first thing in the morning, say goodnight; check in with him when we wake during the night. He won’t be asleep.

A messy business

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[There are] sordid difficulties and uncertainties which attend the life of interior solitude… The disconcerting task of facing and accepting one’s own absurdity. The anguish of realizing that underneath the apparently logical pattern of a more or less “well organized” and rational life, there lies an abyss of irrationality, confusion, pointlessness, and indeed of apparent chaos… It cannot be otherwise: for in renouncing diversion, [the solitary] renounces the seemingly harmless pleasure of building a tight, self-contained illusion about himself and about his little world. He accepts the difficulty of facing the million things in his life which are incomprehensible, instead of simply ignoring them…

Often the lonely and the empty have found their way into this pure silence only after many false starts. They have taken many wrong roads, even roads that were totally alien to their character and vocation. They have repeatedly contradicted themselves and their own inmost truth…

One has to be born into solitude carefully, patiently and after long delay, out of the womb of society.

Thomas Merton, Disputed Questions, with thanks to Maria Popova

I have written often enough before here about my own strange calling to a kind of solitude; Merton, with typical honesty, puts his finger right on one of the inevitable difficulties of this kind of life.

For a long time, since in fact long before I had developed any kind of regular contemplative practice, and was still very unsure of the relations between philosophy, spirituality and religion, I have been drawn towards stillness, and towards this kind of unseen apartness. And, over the years, my more settled contemplative practice has only deepened that longing. The effects of practice on one’s inner life are sometimes subtle, and they are not always obviously connected to any subjective experience on the part of the one practising; on the other hand, their effects on one’s life in the world may be anything but subtle.

Inward solitude, as Merton points out, can be a messy business. Approached like this, as a perhaps inevitable concomitant of the contemplative life, rather than as a willed commitment to what is too often described as a “vocation”, it can often only really be reached after many, at times excoriating, false starts. It seems to be a path unusually unsuited to maintaining a high opinion of oneself!

I suppose that when it comes down to it, what I am trying to say is that the path of inward solitude, or whatever it should be called, is something one finds oneself falling into when everything else has fallen to bits. Only when there is no other way does the way open; and it is the way one has been searching for all along.

A Lighthouse for Dark Times

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It is during phase transition — when the temperature and pressure of a system go beyond what the system can withstand and matter changes from one state to another — that the system is most pliant, most possible. This chaos of particles that liquefies solids and vaporizes liquids is just the creative force by which the new order of a more stable structure finds itself. The world would not exist without these discomposing transitions, during which everything seems to be falling apart and entropy seems to have the last word. And yet here it is, solid beneath our living feet — feet that carry value systems, systems of sanity, just as vulnerable to the upheavals of phase transition yet just as resilient, saved too by the irrepressible creative force that makes order, makes beauty, makes a new and stronger structure of possibility out of the chaos of such times.

Cultures and civilizations tend to overestimate the stability of their states, only to find themselves regularly discomposed by internal pressures and tensions too great for the system to hold. And yet always in them there are those who harness from the chaos the creative force to imagine, and in the act of imagining to effect, a phase transition to a different state…

[But w]e too are living now through such a world, caught again between two ages, confused and conflicted, suffocating and suffering. But we have a powerful instrument for self-understanding, for cutting through the confusion to draw from these civilizational phase transitions new and stronger structures of possibility: the creative spirit.

Maria Popova, The Marginalian (with thanks to What’s here now)