Instead of either-or, try to think both-and. 

A sure path to pain, conflict, and not understanding someone else's experience is getting stuck in only thinking about something from a single perspective.

Wisdom often means embracing two seeming contradictions rather than thinking only one can be correct. 

You need both extended solitude and community.

You are healed by both vulnerably sharing your story and holding courageous boundaries.

You can follow the rules and decide when to break them.

You can find incredible opportunities hidden amidst devastating loss.

Solve strategic problems by switching between thinking granularly and seeing the dynamics of the systems.

When in conflict, you can hold onto your value while still going first in initiating both humble confession and expressing care.

You can think analytically and logically while inviting emotions to belong and express.

You can practice disciplines rigorously and consistently while letting go of the egoic need to perform or impress.

You may have done things one way only to discover a different way of living. To genuinely rise to the next stage, don't throw away the fundamental old lessons of the first stage; build upon them.

Maturity is holding the dynamic between chaos and order. Too much chaos and you are consumed. Too much order and you are rigid and uncreative.

Quotes

"It seems as though we must use sometimes the one theory and sometimes the other, while at times we may use either. We are faced with a new kind of difficulty. We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do." 

Albert Einstein, The Evolution of Physics
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"Instead, all these complex systems have somehow acquired the ability to bring order and chaos into a special kind of balance. This balance point—often called the edge of chaos—is were the components of a system never quite lock into place, and yet never quite dissolve into turbulence, either. The edge of chaos is where life has enough stability to sustain itself and enough creativity to deserve the name of life. The edge of chaos is where new ideas and innovative genotypes are forever nibbling away at the edges of the status quo, and where even the most entrenched old guard will eventually be overthrown. The edge of chaos is where centuries of slavery and segregation suddenly give way to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s; where seventy years of Soviet communism suddenly give way to political turmoil and ferment; where eons of evolutionary stability suddenly give way to wholesale species transformation. The edge of chaos is the constantly shifting battle zone between stagnation and anarchy, the one place where a complex system can be spontaneous, adaptive, and alive."

Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity

Questions

How else can I think about this?

How could the opposite be possible?

What if there was truth in both possibilities?

Endnote

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Live wisely,

Josh

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