Contradiction and Complexity
I was at my daughter’s graduation ceremony last month in Boulder, Colorado as she received her M.F.A for Creative Writing. One of the speakers at the ceremony talked about how writers and poets, instead of striving to understand life in either/or terms, are able to see and embrace the complexities of human life. And that writers and poets strive to understand, express and honor life’s multi-faceted, rich and complex essence.
I love this, because as a therapist, I am faced daily with the complexity of human emotions and our human experience. I see, how often in my own life and in the lives of my clients, there are no easy answers, or clear cut directions. The reality is, we experience layers of feeling, amidst endless information, contexts and possibilities. And when we can first just accept that life is complex, we are able to move into a deeper understanding of our circumstances.
In addition to the complexity of our human experience and the emotions that are born of our experience, much of the time we are holding contradictory emotions, simultaneously. For example, we can be happy for a grown child who received the job of his/her dreams, but grieve that they will move far away from us to do this job. We can feel grateful for the progress we make in healing from an illness, but struggle with feelings of anger, loss or sadness with how the illness has changed our life. All at once, we can feel peace and fear; we can experience love and anger; we can feel desire and a closed heart; we can feel hopefulness and trepidation; we can feel powerful and vulnerable. More often than not, life hands us experiences that leave us feeling so many emotions all at once, not just one clear and crystallized emotion.
The amazing thing is that we do not have to feel overwhelmed with the complexity of our lives or with our emotions. Ironically, we can still live simply even while we embrace the complexity of life. Living simply requires us to accept, with grace and patience, what is laid out before us, and to face things as they are. Living simply means we don’t resist the nature of life, the ups and downs, the challenges and disappointments. Instead, we realize that happiness does not get put on hold until the hard stuff ends; we can embrace small moments, sometimes big moments, of happiness, peace, love, joy, contentment, and gratitude while also holding, acknowledging and addressing the hard stuff.
We live in a society that resists and avoids the difficult emotions such as fear, grief, anger and prioritizes and glorifies the easier, more comfortable emotions. But when we begin to categorize our emotions as “good/bad” or “positive/negative”, we are judging and editing our lives so that only certain experiences or emotions will be welcomed. Others will be ignored, avoided or denied. In an attempt to resist the uncomfortable experiences, we adopt complicated maneuverings and ineffective strategies. And once we do this, we make complexity into the enemy. When complexity is the enemy, we cut ourselves off from the energetic core of life; we stay on the surface of things, instead of diving deeply. We miss living with an open heart and then, we miss developing a true understanding of ourselves and those we love.
Stillness, awareness, deeply listening, acceptance and being present help us to acknowledge life’s complexity but to not be overwhelmed by it. I can feel many things at once, often feelings that seem to be in direct opposition to each other. And when I pause and make room for all of my experiences, when I am still and listen to what I am feeling, when I do not judge but embrace all of my emotions compassionately, I am fully alive. I learn that even the difficult emotions are my teachers and help me to grow.
There is a beauty in diving deeply into the rawness of our experiences and not filtering or editing or judging. When we commit to this, we are saying “yes” to the fullness of life, we are saying “yes” to our imperfect selves, we are saying “yes” to all that the universe is offering us. And ironically in accepting all the complexities and contradictions of our life, we become more and more able to access the universal source of love. We can just be, as we are; feel what we feel and recognize all of it as essential parts making us whole. When we do this we can live as we are meant to live… with an open, gracious and accepting heart.
