Two Hands to Hold

Embracing everything beyond explanation.

Photo by Luis Quintero on Unsplash

One morning this summer, while sitting in meditation, a phrase appeared to me that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since:

Life is impermanent,

Impossibly beautiful.

These two things, impermanence and beauty, change and wonder, have felt inseparable in my life lately. It’s an odd feeling, and different from how we usually relate to what’s meaningful in our lives. We are drawn to what feels lasting, enduring, and familiar. We want to take what we love along with us as we move through life, to have things that can endure the turmoil of inevitable change.

Our instinct is to cling to what we care about, to hold onto it as long as we can. We want our relationships to stay in the forms that please us. When we buy something, we need to keep it as ‘new’ as possible. If we’re favored at work, we don’t want anyone else getting in the way. Life as a possession, as something we ‘own’, can be reassuring, comforting in a certain sense.

In recent weeks, my whole life has been the opposite of this. I’ve felt increasingly unable to hold onto anything that I love. The people whom I’m closest to have moved, or live far away on other sides of the country. I’ve changed neighborhoods, switched teams in my job, experienced uncertainty in my role altogether. My parents are getting older. In the day-to-day life as a hospice chaplain, I’ve seen people whom I’ve grown fond of pass away unexpectedly, families experience sudden unrest, life happening in ways they had not hoped for.

These might sound like negative or stressful experiences. Maybe they’ve been challenging in a relative sense, but sitting with them has revealed something more. Each change has felt less like a loss than an invitation to draw closer to life, to listen closely to its rhythm. In doing so, I’ve discovered happiness in the joy that my friends are finding in their lives. The times I get to reconnect with my loved ones feel priceless. I’m learning with my parents in new ways. Conversations in my work are savored for their wisdom and fresh honesty. Alongside disappointment and uncertainty, I’m finding gratitude, patience, and opportunities to rest in appreciation.

When I can’t separate the beauty of life from the fact that it changes, a door seems to open. Through that door lies a chance to be deeply, vibrantly present: instead of resisting the passing of things, I find myself still, stunned by what graces my life. Knowing that something will go away has made its arrival a profound blessing.

Maybe it’s living in New York City, or the hours spent living along the edges of life and death, but I’ve felt compelled by the urge to make enough space for everything that happens. It hasn’t felt right to box things out, to avoid what’s discomforting, or make parts of my life untouchable. I don’t want to turn away from the hard stuff, and I want to embrace what’s good with everything I have. All of it seems to matter somehow, life calling to itself from different places.

In this practice of holding both things, it’s also relaxing my instinct to deal in opposites. Collective life is overwhelmed by this: things are either good or bad, hopeful or hopeless, emergent or catastrophic. Emotionally, psychologically, dare I say spiritually; it’s very intense to live this way. It’s like having a person tugging on each of our arms, pulling as hard as they possibly can.

The anxiety, I think, is to know where we stand. Not only are we experiencing change in the world (and in our lives), but we are experiencing it at a pace that is simply too rapid to process meaningfully. Our consciousness is aware of how things move not only in our homes, but in our state, our country, our planet, all at once. How is one person supposed to make sense of that? How is anyone meant to experience this change carefully, thoughtfully, or consider what it means for their own life? To at least have a name for that change (it’s an apocalypse!), to give it a label (everything will be fine), offers a place to land, a sense of direction.

For myself, moving outside of that dichotomy has given some perspective. In fact, I haven’t written here for a while because I’ve felt buried in points of view, flooded with opinions (good and bad) about how I ‘should’ feel about the change we all experience in the world. The scale of perspective matches the rate of change: there is a real urgency to describe, interpret, and determine what is happening as quickly as it occurs. Rather than relate to change, we’re driven to explain it. While not entirely a bad thing, I’ve felt overwhelmed by explanation and untethered from my own sense of things. Recognizing that, I needed a chance to step back and wonder about what’s moving for me.

The Catholic contemplative Thomas Merton (whom I’ve quoted here before) once wrote,

We have been brought up with the absurd prejudice that only what we can reduce to a rational and conscious formula is really understood and experienced in our life. When we can say what a thing is, or what we are doing, we think we fully grasp and experience it…this verbalization…tends to cut us off from genuine experience and to obscure our understanding instead of increasing it.¹

Strong words, but I think there’s something there that speaks to how we are grappling with change today. Perhaps the overload of opinion, the emphatic need to determine its direction, reflects the underlying impulse to “fully grasp and experience it”. Or: it reflects the fear that we have no grasp on things to begin with; that we feel out of control and disoriented about our lives altogether.

Personally, I would not go so far as to label this reaction as absurd; I think it’s safe to simply name how it can get us in trouble. It is entirely natural, and very human, to feel threatened by change. After all, impermanence likely reflects what we fear most: dying. Each change in our life is a miniature death, a transition from familiar to unknown. From the smallest disruptions to the biggest losses of our lives, we experience change as an unwelcome interruption to the expected, the planned, the hopeful.

Where is the beauty in that? How can our lives be uncertain and whole at the same time?

I have no intent to use this platform to add to the answer-mill, and I’m not sure that these questions offer satisfying answers in word anyway. I think we have to see for ourselves, to give our lives a chance to say more than one thing. I agree with Merton that we can lean too heavily on rationalizing, that explanations can at times lead us further away from what’s genuine. Far from having answers myself, I only know that I’m engaging something in my life that’s causing me to ask such questions. At the very least, exploring them seems to lead somewhere.²

One thing that remains possible for us right now is the opportunity to hold more than one thing, even if they seem to contradict each other. That is very hard to do in a world that demands that we define ourselves, stand in something specific, pick a side, so to speak. To suggest doing this implies that we’re playing devil’s advocate, or acting contrarian to avoid taking responsibility. We are suspicious, and rightly so, of phrases like “two things can be true at the same time”, which seems to reduce values and authentic experiences into vague agreements.

I think learning to hold our lives with two hands is an act of taking more responsibility, not less. Inevitably, you face the contradictions of being human, both within yourself and in the conflicts that we’ve created in the world. You are not allowed the safety of explaining things away-you have to keep looking, compelled to go deeper. It’s uncomfortable, but also expansive. It increases our capacity to live in the world, to be more conscious, curious humans.

Looking into my own hands, I can see this perspective which feels true for me. Life is impermanent. It is impossibly beautiful. I can see them both in my palms, feel how they shift and link together. Somehow, in some way, they seem to be inextricably linked.

In recent months, my heart has broken daily while experiencing joy unlike anything I’ve encountered in my life. I am in love, while losing what I find lovely. I find peace and resolve as the world burns. People give me hope while others ruin lives. All of these things happen together, are equally important, and I cannot separate them from each other. I don’t understand how, but I know that I have two hands to hold it all as best I can.

Life is never going to be just one thing, and to reduce it as such is to reduce ourselves, to make ourselves smaller. Holding life with two hands is an act of interest, of belief in our own being. In doing so, we say yes to mystery and allow it to teach us something. As life inevitably changes, we allow ourselves to transform with it. It is true that we must inevitably let go of things that we love, but that does not make life less beautiful. Perhaps as we allow things to change, that beauty becomes a part of us, allowing us to express it back into the world.

1. Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, pg. 136.

2. In any case, not everything that happens in our world is rational, and therefore cannot be apprehended by rational means.