Though I do try, I find that holding two opposing truths is actually quite difficult at times.
I remember the moment this challenge became really apparent to me: it was April 15, 2013.
This was the day of the Boston Marathon bombing, which was also the day I learned I was pregnant with my daughter.
I had been trying to get pregnant for some time, and had already had one miscarriage. But on April 15th of that year, the pregnancy test finally said "positive."
I remember the feeling of pure joy inside me as I excitedly carried my pee stick around the house, but as the television was still on in the background reporting the news of death and carnage at the marathon finish line, the despair and fear was quite visceral as well which made the feeling of joy almost wrong.
I do not share this as a story of self-criticism, but rather as a matter of fact on account of growing up in the west, where we like our tidy headlines and simple narratives (i.e. in our politics), even if the numbers just don't add up.
Because to have confusion, ambivalence, conflict, and uncertainty is just so messy.
And messy is so...messy.
The unfortunate reality is, western culture just doesn't do a very good job at teaching our communities how to hold two opposing truths like life and death, joy and despair, friend and enemy in our hearts and minds at the same time. And this leads us to solely rely upon trite phrases like "everything happens for a reason," that, at best, can be quite invalidating of the very real complexity at play.
This is why I always liked what the Unitarian Universalist Minister, author and Maine Game Warden Chaplain Kate Braestrup had to say about the tragic death of her husband (who was a police officer and the father of her 4 young children):
I can't make those two realities -- what I've lost and what I've found -- fit together in some tidy pattern of divine causality. I just have to hold them on the one hand and on the other, just like that.
On a deeply personal note, I recently learned someone I knew attempted suicide by jumping off of the same bridge that I have done an annual summer solstice yoga day each year, and now, every time I drive by that bridge, I think of the suicide attempt and yogis doing sun salutations.
I just have to hold them on the one hand and on the other, just like that.
On a far lighter note, my husband and I were chatting this morning before work about a recent vacation that did not go exactly according to our expectations- expectations that were based on well over 10 years of the exact same summer vacation.
Yet we both agreed, even though there was, shall we say, messiness, there were also beautiful moments--beautiful moments with our children, beautiful moments by the ocean--that were intertwined with the less-than-beautiful moments.
Nearly three years ago I was introduced to a phrase: "In this, there is that." It was written in a now favorite book of mine, One Buddha is Not Enough.
When I first read this phrase, made up of a mere 5 words, I did not realize at the time how important it would become to me as I tried to skillfully navigate the quite often disparate roads of life.
Now, this phrase has become more akin to an unofficial mantra for me, just as dialectics and dialectical philosophy has become more of a personal philosophy.
I think rare moments like these can happen when you fall upon a truth that deeply resonates as a core truth- a truth that seems to have existed before you even had the words to articulate it or the wisdom to comprehend it.
And it is only in retrospect that you are able to see the trail of bread crumbs that led you to this exact space in time when the phrase "In this, there is that" seems to cover, well, everything.
I was reminded of one of those bread crumbs on my own trail toward dialectical thinking just this morning while listening to NPR on my drive in to work during a radio interview with author Sherman Alexie.
For those of you who do not know this fantastic National Book Award winner and writer of short-stories, novels, poetry and now memoir (his newest book just out this month is called You Don't Have to Say You Love Me), I have found him to be the literary embodiment of dialectical philosophy.
From my first read of his 1993 book The Lone Ranger and Tonto FistFight in Heaven to his more recent works, I found Mr. Alexie's ability to validate the messy complexity of culture, relationships and existential awareness to be profoundly soothing to my at times restless soul.
Listening to his interview, I was in turn reminded why it is we need--and are starved for--not only phrases and philosophies, but also the arts in the form of books, film, song, paintings, poetry, and plays, to act as containers in which we can learn, explore and imagine the possibility of skillfully mastering the wholeness and integration of actually holding these two (or three or four) opposing truths safely, or even, maybe, artfully.
May it be so.
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