As a coach, one of specialties is playing with paradoxes.
It seems that our minds enjoy either/or buckets and thoughts.
You may want the truth to lie in one answer.
I’m angry or joyful.
I’m a victim or a perpetrator.
I’m resigned or I’m ambitious.
I’m in love or I’m not.
But what if we could simultaneously be both? What if that were true?
It’s messy, I know.
The mind will not enjoy this— and yet, there is more to you beyond your mind.
Your essence.
Your soul.
The seemingly contradictory paradoxes that make us human beings. The messy draw-out-side-of-the-lines experiences we’ve all encountered.
We also apply these buckets to our worldviews and our relationships.
If I am right, they are wrong.
If I am speaking my truth, they are lying.
Again, this zero sum game has taught us to choose a side.
That there is safety in choosing. There is also victory in ‘rightness’– or so we want to believe.
I haven’t found myself or others that easy to label, box or strip into wins or losses.
I actually don’t think that’s the point of this life adventure (even though it could be contrary to what we’ve learned along the way).
Underneath the either-or buckets, may be there is less knowing. More uncertainty. The space where all things can be true and not true simultaneously.
The place where you are not constrained by one moment, one word, one action to define and label all the days of your life – instead, you greet a moment that expands to hold all the things— without judgment, priority or absolute knowing.
It hurts the mind to bend the rules.
But I’d love to see you try anyway.
Because when we invite the not-knowing and the paradox to sit within us, you may find peace.
You may find freedom.
The things you thought you’d already discovered when you were busy being right or being one thing feel less significant because their permanence is met with impermanence.
Will you play with ‘and’ to see what you may find?
Maybe you’ll discover the answer and the question.
Life can be so much juicier with living paradoxes — and in the space where there is no ‘one knowing’—- you may just find everything.