Sitting in the Tension

All of us have experienced loss- loss of love, loss of health, loss of a dream. In times of loss we often don’t know what to do with the emotions we experience. One of the most valuable things I’ve learned in walking through life after loss is the knowledge that I can hold multiple emotions at the same time. The understanding that one doesn’t discount another. When you’ve lived the majority of your life pushing away the not-so-fun emotions because you don’t want to miss out on the more positive ones and then are suddenly faced with circumstances that force you to spend time hanging out with those harder to experience ones, you have to adjust your perception or you’ll end up in total despair. This realization was the beginning of a paradigm shift for me which set me on a journey to discover that the best of life is lived in the tension between the emotions, the tension between the easy and the hard. Life can’t be fully lived trying to camp in one or the other and when we learn we can hold both simultaneously, life becomes much more rich and enjoyable.