There is something slightly contradictory about the phrase, intention and surrender. The first asks for control. The second asks for its absence.
To approach something with intention is to decide what is wanted from it. To surrender is to accept that what happens next might bear very little resemblance to that decision. Put together, they offer a way of approaching life that sits somewhere between having a plan and giving up on plans altogether.
The first half comes much more naturally.
There is comfort in deciding what something is for. A date is easier to understand when it is moving towards a relationship. A degree makes sense when it points towards a career. A friendship is good when it is reciprocal and fulfilling. A Saturday is well spent when something has been accomplished with it.
An outcome gives the present a purpose.
The difficulty is that life has a fairly poor record of respecting intended outcomes. The job that was supposed to begin a career can be awful. The relationship approached with the healthiest possible intentions can still end. The person who was meant to be casual can become anything but. A night reluctantly agreed to can be better than the one planned for weeks.
Surrender begins at the point where intention stops being useful.
Perhaps the hardest part is recognising where personal intention ends. Someone can communicate perfectly and still be misunderstood. They can show up consistently for a friendship and watch it fade anyway. They can be clear about wanting a relationship without making the other person want one too. There is a limit to how much the correct behaviour can guarantee the desired response.
This can be particularly difficult when so much advice implies otherwise. Communicate properly, establish boundaries, ask for what is wanted, put the effort in. All worthwhile things to do, but they can quietly create the expectation that behaving well should produce a corresponding reward. Sometimes it simply doesn't. Another person remains entitled to disappoint, misunderstand, change their mind or want something entirely different.
Intention, then, might be most useful when applied to behaviour rather than results. It can determine how somebody wants to act, what they are willing to accept and what they are prepared to pursue. It cannot determine how any of it will be received.
It does not require abandoning what was wanted in the first place. Someone can want a relationship and still allow a date to simply be a date. They can desperately want a particular job while accepting that not getting it does not automatically make the application a waste of time. A friendship can be entered without deciding whether it will last forever.
There is a peculiar freedom in allowing an experience to be worthwhile even when it fails to become what it was supposed to become.
That is harder than it sounds. Outcomes provide a convenient way of judging whether something was worth doing. The date either went somewhere or it didn't. The application was successful or unsuccessful. The project worked or failed. The friendship lasted or fell apart.
Surrender complicates that accounting.
A relationship that ends after two years has not necessarily failed because it didn't last sixty. A hobby abandoned after six months was not necessarily pointless because nobody became particularly good at it. A friendship that belonged intensely to one period of life does not become meaningless because the people involved eventually grew apart.
Not everything has to justify itself through permanence.
Permanence is only one way of measuring value, but it is the one that tends to make the neatest story. Long relationships are celebrated through anniversaries. Careers make sense when each job appears to lead logically to the next. Lifelong friendships are treated as more significant than those that arrive intensely and disappear. Temporary things are harder to account for because their ending can make them look unsuccessful. But duration and importance are not necessarily the same thing.
This becomes particularly obvious in retrospect. Lives rarely look as deliberate backwards as they were supposed to look forwards. The significant person met by accident, the subject chosen almost arbitrarily, the flat taken because the other one fell through, the friend made through somebody no longer spoken to. What later appears like a sequence of important decisions often contains an uncomfortable amount of chance.
There is no need to romanticise that. Chance produces terrible outcomes as readily as good ones. Surrender is not the belief that everything happens for a reason, or that disappointment is secretly the universe redirecting somebody towards something better. Sometimes something goes wrong and remains simply disappointing.
The surrender is in not needing to immediately turn it into something else.
There is a tendency to make disappointment useful as quickly as possible. A breakup becomes a lesson. Rejection becomes redirection. A bad year produces personal growth. Even loss can be hurried towards a meaning that makes it easier to accommodate.
Sometimes there is no lesson available yet. Sometimes the job was wanted and somebody else got it. Sometimes a relationship ended and it would have been preferable if it hadn't. Acceptance does not require pretending the unwanted outcome was secretly the correct one.
It only requires acknowledging that it is now the outcome that exists.
This is where intention becomes useful again. Once what cannot be controlled has been surrendered, there are still decisions to make about what happens next.
Perhaps that is what makes the pairing more useful than either idea on its own. Intention alone can turn life into a series of attempts to force reality into the shape already imagined for it. Surrender alone leaves very little reason to choose anything at all.
Together, they allow for wanting things quite badly without making their arrival a condition of being okay.
Make the plan because there is somewhere worth going. Say what is wanted because ambiguity is not inherently romantic. Apply for something difficult. Care whether it works. Hope that it does.
The surrender comes afterwards.
Not because the outcome doesn't matter, but because wanting something and controlling whether it happens were never the same thing.
Written By: Holly Warren
Edited By: Hazel Hunter
