The Tension of Opposites

Though it may be contrary to much of what we have been taught, opposite things can both be true, and at the same time.

• We can love someone intensely and be filled with rage towards them.
• We can hate saying goodbye to someone and be very relieved at doing so.
• We can despair that life is meaningless and be deeply appreciative of the meaningful gesture of a friend.
• We can suffer deep sorrow at losing a relationship and feel excitement at new roads ahead.
• We can delight at new opportunities and be overcome with fear of the unknown.
• We can celebrate how far we’ve come in our personal journeys and experience feelings of being frustrated and stuck.
• We can mourn our own deep losses and challenges and recognize that our lives are very blessed and full.

All those things may make sense on paper, but in the midst of the actual emotional experience, we may focus on one to the exclusion of the other.  When we cannot live with the tension of the opposites, we tend to swing from one extreme to the other, or focus intensely on the one in order to drown out the other side that we feel is not as valid. – maybe because we think we “should” feel a certain way, or one feeling is not acceptable to us.  Perhaps we don’t want to feel that we have real anger against someone who’s been good to us and who did not mean us harm. Maybe we are so in touch with our sense of the meaningless of life that there is no room for anything that may bring that into question. Or we are so happy about some new opportunity or chapter that it feels ungrateful or potentially dangerous to entertain that feeling of trepidation.  Perhaps we are so aware of the pain of humanity that we feel we have no right to complain about our own difficult situations, or, conversely, that we have no right to be happy in the face of so much human suffering.

But here’s the thing: both “sides” can be true, both can be valid because they both belong to you.  If they are both true, then they both need to be acknowledged, and safely given voice and space.  Feelings that we do not allow ourselves to FEEL remain with us, underground, and either come bursting out later in an instinctive attempt to bring some balance, or remain in the soil of our psyches, finding their way into our lives and choices in ways of which we are not aware.

If you find it in there, allow it all to be true, because it all is.  Say hello to all of it, acknowledge the opposites, write about it, talk to someone about it.  Of course, we get to choose what we will ultimately put our energies towards, as we are all responsible for how we live our lives. But it’s in experiencing and living within the tension of all the different parts of ourselves that we begin to find real balance, and live more honestly, and more clearly.