In grad school, a professor of mine once concluded a tedious, hair-splitting seminar by stating a simple phrase that would linger in my mind for years. “We’re all adults here,” he reminded us in a mild southern drawl. “We can handle a little ambiguity.” The words were intended to sooth us after a session that had been especially hairy; after hours of debating and haggling over word choice, we felt our understanding of the topic was weaker than when we’d walked in. Ultimately, the discussion had opened more doors than it had shut. When we shuffled out, flushed and frazzled, the sense of defeat in the room was palpable, having been able to draw no concrete conclusions.
It turned out my professor’s sentiment would forever change the way I chose to process new and conflicting information. Seeing past the childhood notion of black and white absolutes is an essential part of growing up. When you stop trying to shove conflicting information into boxes, and instead let it remain mysterious for awhile, allowing the pieces to come together one at a time, the picture the puzzle makes will reveal itself to you. And sometimes that picture, that truth, is pretty unexpected.
Over the course of my 28 years, there are five particular paradoxes that, after confounding and frustrating me for ages, I’ve finally come to accept as truths:
1. Courage requires fear: you are more powerful when you embrace your vulnerabilities
Who is braver – the woman who fearlessly scales a rock face, or the woman terrified of heights who, trembling from head to toe, does the same? As many wise people have argued before, courage is not the lack of fear – it is the confrontation of it. We all have fears – of failure, of rejection, of blood, of people near us suddenly erupting into volcanoes of vomit (okay, maybe that last one is mostly mine). It’s okay to have those fears; you’re only a coward if you let those fears be the loudest voice in the room when you make life choices. For example, I have intense social anxiety when it comes to playing sports even though a large part of me enjoys them. I’ve embraced this vulnerability but I haven’t caved into it; these days, I’m playing volleyball and forgiving myself when I suck. I’ve found it’s worth the pre-game jitters to reap the reward of playing, and over time, that voice of fear is quieting down. Which leads us to our next point…
2. There’s nothing to fear but fear itself
I read a poem in college in which the narrator is terrified of a hornet’s nest in his yard. The fear becomes so intolerable that he destroys the nest, killing all the hornets in the process. The same night, he dreams of himself and his colleagues in their work cubicles as a mysterious force obliterates them all. Ironically, the narrator was the dangerous force all along; the hornets were harmless.
The message is clear: fear will turn you into a monster. The rhetoric of fear is an age-old tool used by politicians and marketers to manipulate you into following their agenda; vote for me or the sky will fall; buy this product or no one will think you’re worthy of love.
Learn to greet cries of the sky is falling with skepticism. If you let fear drive your life, you’ll become the person worthy of fearing.
3. Love your enemy: Hating people only hurts you
I used to entertain spiteful fantasies in which my nemesis got his/her very-public comeuppance and was forced to shovel manure in the streets for the rest of their livelong days. It wasn’t a very productive use of my time. I know, I know: turning the other cheek is a drag, and far less worthy of cinematic attention than a well-deserved bitch slap. But the relationship between the number of people you despise and the amount of time you are miserable is directly proportional. Hatred is lazy; compassion takes work. Hatred allows you to keep that black and white mentality of good and bad people and to dismiss them categorically, in legions. It’s really good at sapping our life force and changing nothing. Change only occurs through compassion, which requires you to consider and acknowledge that other people’s behaviors are usually the result of suffering, fear, and mistreatment. Challenge yourself to feel genuine empathy for the people who make your blood boil and you’ll find personal peace.
4. You don't really want what you want
Before I went abroad for a year, I wrote my boyfriend a series of letters. In one of them I painted a picture of our future perfect life together. As I filled in the details of this fantasy – where we would live, the kind of home we would have, the timeline on which we’d graduate from dating to marriage, to a pet cat, and to a family – I grew despondent. The arrival of this emotion frightened me – did I not want this life? I mulled it over awhile and realized that yes, I did hope for marriage and a family in my future with my boyfriend, but I didn’t want to know all the details yet. I yearned for some amount of the unexpected, for adventure.
If you get everything you want and your life goes according to plan, you will be bored out of your skull. When we’re surprised, when things don’t go according to plan – that’s when things get interesting. And what we really want, what we really need, more than a picture-perfect life, is a life that is interesting. So when your perfect plan gets derailed, don’t lose hope – these experiences, good or bad, will build to make a rich and engaging life.
5. Dwelling on happiness makes you unhappy
This phenomenon has a growing collection of research behind it, but many of us have learned this lesson anecdotally. A certain amount of self-reflection is good, but the problem about constantly ruminating on the status of your own happiness is that the picture frame is always set squarely on you. Regardless of what our modern individualistic society has told you, most humans are not designed to live solely for themselves, and if you’re always caught in the mind frame of me me me, you’ll grow lonely and miserable. True happiness involves an element of losing yourself to a moment; it requires putting the ego to rest. And how can you have time to get lost in a moment if you’re interrupting it by taking your own happiness temperature all the time? Social media apps exacerbate this problem, requiring us to halt the momentum of happiness and collect evidence of it for others. Happiness will come to you only when you cease grasping at it so desperately.
And, contrary to popular opinion, happiness isn’t everything. Happiness is like candy – it’s good to enjoy the pleasure and light heart that happiness brings, but it isn’t substantial enough to bring us life satisfaction by itself. We have a strong need to achieve, and achievement requires struggle and a lot of other emotions that don’t look pretty on camera. You shouldn’t let momentary unhappiness lead you to believe you are an unhappy person overall.
As I’ve grown up, I’ve learned to make peace with the fact that I will never understand everything. I hope that as life continues to present me with its awe-inspiring, difficult, fascinating, sticky mysteries, I will have the courage and patience not to run away from what I don’t understand, but let it unravel in front of me in its own way, on its own timeline; life is so much more interesting when you give up black and white for Technicolor.
