The 'And' of It All

holding joy and sorrow together

A short history of my recent Google searches:

ways to get rid of ants in the house

four month sleep regression how long

what’s a synonym for cataclysm

And a question for which Google will never have an answer:

how to hold joy and sorrow together

More than any other, this is the question I have been tangling and untangling for months—for years, really—worrying in my hands like a knotted string.

This past year has held a lot of peripheral sadness. Catastrophic losses have devastated people I love, leaving me intact but still feeling the aftershocks. I’ve grieved with and for loved ones, perplexed at the dissonance of being okay while others near me are not. It hasn’t been an unusual year; this is just life, serving sometimes larger and sometimes smaller portions of every experience. We are accompanied by abundance, sadness, delight, trauma, often all at once. Even if grief is absent in our personal lives, we carry the weight of public tragedy with us everywhere: lamenting yet another school shooting while walking the dog, listening to news of genocide while stopped at a red light.

The question I’ve held for the past 12 months, phrased and framed in different ways but always the same at its heart is this: how do I live well in a world that dishes out sorrow and joy in equal measure and often at the same time—while being true to both? Is it possible to lament and give thanks simultaneously, or to taste delight without letting it numb us to injustice? Is it possible to be companioned by both grief and joy, without one eclipsing the other? Am I large enough to hold them all?

One final question: Is it possible that their coexistence, their constant side-by-sideness, could deepen and not diminish the other?

A couple weeks ago I pulled a favorite memoir off my bookshelf, hunting for a passage that I remembered speaking to this exact question. Lost & Found by Kathryn Schulz is divided in three sections, one for losing, one for finding, and one for the and of it all. In “Lost,” Schulz writes about the death of her father; in “Found,” about falling in love with her wife; and in the final section, “And,” about how these contradictory experiences are always accompanying us in ways small and large.

Toward the end of the book, Schulz is looking through photos from her wedding day. She stops short at an image that precisely captures the acute, ongoing absence of her father. In it, she and her mother stand beaming at the edge of the Chesapeake Bay. On Schulz’s other side, where her father should have stood, there is only an empty expanse. “After the shock of first seeing it wore off,” she writes, “I came to love it very much, partly for the way it makes my loss visible and beautiful—it feels like the closest thing I have to a picture of my father at my wedding—but chiefly because, in a singe image, it honors my joy together with my grief.”

And then she goes on, in a passage I underlined when I first read it and have returned to several times since:

“Life, too, goes by contraries: it is by turns crushing and restorative, busy and boring, awful and absurd and comic and uplifting. We can’t get away from this constant amalgamation of feeling, can’t strain out the ostensible impurities in pursuit of some imaginary essence, and we shouldn’t want to if we could. The world in all its complexity calls on us to respond in kind, so that to be conflicted is not to be adulterated; it is to be complete.”

To be conflicted is to be complete.

The other night, my toddler invented a new game as a way to prolong her ever-more-drawn-out bedtime routine. We were sitting together on the floor of her room, me trying to coax her into pajamas, her somersaulting and giggling and doing her best impression of a tiny tornado. She told me she had a secret and leaned close to my ear to whisper-yell, “I WUV YOU.” Cue me whispering back, I love you too! Cue her shrieking with delight. She did this again and again: tucking my hair back, grasping my ear with both hands, and then whispering in her raspy voice before bustling to my other side to repeat the process. More shrieking, more delight. As I watched her I thought, she feels everything so purely. The emotions that flood her are unadulterated. She can be overtaken by pure glee and seconds later be flailing on the floor in despair. There is no complication there, only a full-bodied surrender to a single experience.

And I thought, then, about how part of my work in parenting her is to teach her how to hold multiple truths in her body. To show her that she can be scared and brave at the same time, or that it can be a hard day and we can still laugh together. To see the state of being conflicted as part of being tender and receptive and whole. As she grows she will become bigger emotionally as well as physically, making space to hold and honor multiple experiences at the same time.

Years ago I read a book review that wasn’t particularly memorable, with the exception of one line that I copied down in the trusty Notes app on my phone. (If these Notes ever disappear I will be bereft of so many half-formed essay ideas and shiny little fragments; iCloud don’t fail me now!) The sentence was this: “Ambivalence is a sign of an interesting mind.” Which led me to another Google search: “define ambivalence.” For many years I thought of ambivalence as a negative descriptor, a word that indicated a kind of wishy-washy apathy. But really, it means the ability to hold simultaneous and contradictory feelings. It is a tug in two directions. To me, ambivalence can indicate a kind of internal spaciousness: being large enough to acknowledge that two things are true. Perhaps ambivalence is not something to avoid but to practice. What largeness this requires of us; what painful growth to expand our hearts and minds to hold it all. Sorrow and joy. Loss and abundance. Gratitude and lament. The and of it all.

Maybe the work of becoming more deeply human—because that’s the goal, right? To become more of what we’re made to be?—involves opening and expanding ourselves so that we can carry contradiction, allowing multiple experiences in our lives to be true. Striving not to preserve gladness from pain, but to become large enough to encompass it all. To be conflicted and complete.

Read with me:

Sharing a poem that captures life’s all-at-once-ness by Clint Smith. “The river that gives us water to drink is the same one that might wash us away.”