Two things can be true at the same time
Each week I come here to share what I have noticed. I notice deeply, and over the years I have learned that naming what is happening inside me is one way my nervous system finds its footing. This noticing practice puts me in the present moment and helps me feel safe.
This week, what I keep noticing is how often a single experience holds two opposite truths at once.
David and I just returned from sixteen days on the road across the Pacific Northwest, and I am still unpacking the suitcases and everything the trip stirred up in me.
If you know me at all, you know how much I love my rituals. My morning tea, my pillow just so, the comfort of knowing where everything lives. So living out of a suitcase for sixteen days is both freeing and deeply disruptive. Every morning a new room, a new bed, and yes, a new hunt for the light switch in the dark. I felt my body brace more than once. And then, often in the very same moment, I felt a surprising lightness. The ease of carrying only what fits in my suitcase. The sweetness of waking somewhere unfamiliar and finding I was still me- next to the familiar warmth of my guy. Unsettled and free, all at once. Both were true.
Then there was the car. Hours and hours beside the man I love. It was deeply comforting. For an introvert like me, it also interrupted the inner quiet I depend on. Closeness that soothes and closeness that crowds sat side by side in the front seat, and I did not have to choose between them.
And then Bend, Oregon. We spent two glorious days with my cousin, his wife, and their daughter. There was steady, comforting conversation, long walks in nature, and the kind of catching up that goes straight to the soul. It felt so intimate and so soothing that I know I will hold the memory of those days for the rest of my life. We hugged goodbye that morning, full and grateful.
Four hours after we drove away, a school shooting in Bend took the lives of three children and a teacher.
I will not try to make sense of that loss. Some things are not meant to be made sense of. They are meant to be grieved. What I can tell you is that the tenderness of those two days and the devastation that followed now live side by side in my body. The town that held us so gently is the same town now holding unbearable grief. Neither truth cancels the other, though for a while I wanted one of them to.
I have noticed that wanting before. The mind loves a tidy story. It wants to know whether something was good or bad, whether we should feel grateful or broken, so it can file the experience away and feel safe again. Our nervous systems are wired for certainty, and holding two opposite feelings can register as danger. So we rush to resolve it. We let grief erase joy, or we cling to joy and turn away from grief.
But I learned something last year in the moment of my bicycle accident with David, which I keep returning to.
The body already knows how to let go. It is the mind that clings.
When I finally stopped gripping, something generous opened up in me, and I have been gently exploring that opening ever since.
This is what I am learning. We are not meant to resolve our opposites. We are meant to hold them. Something can be freeing and disruptive. Comforting and interruptive. Joyful and heartbreaking. The lines do not have to be clean. Life rarely hands us one feeling at a time.
And sometimes one truth deepens the other. Since we came home, I have hugged the people I love a little longer. I reached out to my cousin to tell him how much that time together meant. The grief has made the love sharper, more precious, more awake. That is not a silver lining. It is simply what happens when we let ourselves feel all of it.
The capacity to hold both doesn’t come from willpower or spiritual advancement. It comes from having a generous reserve. From being rested. When we are depleted, we collapse into one truth or go numb to both. When we are rested, there is room inside to stay present to the whole of it, and that presence is where our compassion lives.
Rest is not the reward for doing life well. It is the foundation.
So here is my invitation for your week. When you notice yourself feeling two things at once, resist the urge to pick one. Try replacing the word “but” with “and.” I am exhausted, and I am grateful. I love being close to you, and I need some space. My heart is full, and it’s breaking. Say it out loud if you can, and notice what happens in your body. Let your shoulders drop. Open your hands instead of tightening your grip. You may find, as I have, that holding both isn’t a sign that something is wrong. It is a sign that you are fully alive, and that is where the hope lives.
Forever and always.
L O V E
Sarah ❥
