I’ve been thinking about how hard it is to hold two truths at the same time.
We’re trained, almost from the beginning, to simplify. To sort things into columns. Good or bad. Right or wrong. This or that. It makes the world feel manageable. But it also lies to us. Because real life doesn’t live in the columns. It lives in the in-between, where two things are true at once and neither one cancels the other out.
Grief and joy. Loss and appreciation. Happiness and discontent. We keep waiting for one of them to win, so we can finally know how to feel. But they don’t take turns. They arrive together, holding hands, and we’re left standing in the middle trying to figure out where to put our weight.
It’s hard to learn how to make space for both. I don’t think anyone quite teaches us how.
I find that nature is often one of my best teachers here. It doesn’t argue. It just shows you.
I was watching the ocean recently, and I realized it holds two truths at once, all the time, without any effort at all.
The waves are always coming in. That rhythm never stops. Even when the tide is going out — even when the water line is quietly receding, pulling back toward the deep — the waves are still rolling toward the shore. Coming in and going out, at the very same time. One motion living inside the other.
When you’re standing there, you can’t always tell which direction the tide is going. The waves keep coming either way. You have to stay with it for a while. You have to notice the small things — where the wet sand ends, how far the last wave reached compared to the one before it. Only then does it reveal itself. Only then do you see which truth is stronger in this particular moment.
That’s what holding two truths feels like to me.
Both things are real. Both are moving. The joy is coming in even as the grief pulls back. The appreciation is rolling forward even as the loss recedes. And you don’t have to choose between them. You just have to stay long enough to notice the rhythm — to feel which one is carrying more weight right now, knowing it might shift by tomorrow.
Because that’s the other thing the ocean teaches. The tide is never finished. What’s receding now will come back. What’s rising now will eventually turn. The two truths don’t resolve into one. They keep trading places, slowly, and time shows you which is strongest in each moment.
I think we make ourselves smaller when we insist on picking a side of our own hearts, or one truth to our experience. When we tell ourselves we can’t be grateful because we’re grieving, or that we’re not allowed to grieve because we have so much to be grateful for.
But we can hold both. The ocean does it every single day.
Maybe the work isn’t to resolve the two truths. Maybe it’s just to stay on the shore long enough to watch them move — and to trust that the rhythm knows what it’s doing, even when we don’t.
