Find Comfort in Ambiguity

The great challenge of life—to accept if we are to live truly, deeply, and authentically—is to sit in the fear and find comfort in ambiguity.

Bathe in it.

To observe it working through us rather than shielding ourselves under a myriad of defenses.

If we can just hold on. If we can accept our fragility, our fallibility, and the awkwardness of our predicament here on this planet, what presents itself as a burden becomes one of life’s great gifts. A teacher.

That wellspring of serenity beneath the pained contours of memory and experience that leads us home if we allow it.

To live courageously is to run towards discomfort, into it, beyond it.

To meet things as they are and the past as it was without buffers.

We cannot avoid our suffering forever, and we cannot avoid the painful aspects of love, life, or the realizations and awareness that experience brings.

If we are to live and love boldly and deeply, to act with integrity and in a way worthy of our highest ideals, then we must accept the totality of life and of people. We must accept that we all have hurt each other tremendously in a thousand-and-one unintentional ways along the journey. That nothing operates in a vacuum.

That to live and to love is to hurt and heal simultaneously. That painful moments are often the by-product of opening to life. The void, a space for the formlessness to enter and create. That the joy of loving authentically and honestly sharing with the world far outweighs the painful, difficult, and infuriatingly human moments.

Indifference isn’t strength. It’s avoidance. Cowardice.

Strength is sitting in the unknown, holding on, and staring unguarded into the mystery.

It's feeling everything so completely, bathing so uncomfortably in reality, yet choosing every moment to remain open, loving, and grateful.

Against that, everything else seems small and petty.

As the Tao says:

We are born soft and supple; dead, we are stiff and hard. Plants are born tender and pliant; dead, they are brittle and dry. Thus, whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death. Whoever is soft and yielding, is a disciple of life. An army that cannot yield will be defeated. A tree that cannot bend will crack in the wind. The hard and stiff will be broken. The soft and supple will prevail.

True joy from life’s experiences seems to be only felt by those who remain open and curious in the face of the comic beauty and tragedy of living.