I love the winter Solstice, and the opportunity to celebrate the promise of longer days, all while honoring the darkest day. Both the light and the darkness offer their gifts, though this can be a hard truth to acknowledge.
It seems appropriate to honor both during holiday time, which for many of us is full of layers of emotion and complicated circumstances: joy stacked right on top of grief, served with a side of nostalgia. It’s a complicated sandwich to take a bite of—especially during the darkest, cloudiest days of the year.
It takes courage to hold many truths; to honor complexity. It’s uncomfortable. It also feels like an essential skill for welcoming more softness (and acceptance) into our lives.
Here are a few of my favorite words about holding both:
“We think that the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”
—Pema Chödrön
“To hold the beauty of what is while also bearing the weight of our sorrow limbs that ache for what might have been is the trick of life. To be able to hold both things is the key, if not to happiness, then contentment; to a liberation that only accepting what we cannot change can bring.”
—Cheryl Strayed
“What happens if joy is not separate from pain? What if joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with one another? Or even more to the point, what if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for one another through those things? What if joy, instead of refuge or relief from heartbreak, is what effloresces us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks? Which is to say, what if joy needs sorrow, or what Zadie Smith in her essay ‘Joy’ calls ‘the intolerable,’ for its existence?”
—Ross Gay
I wish you tenderness with yourself as you hold whatever complexity is yours.
I’m just a handful of pages into Ross Gay’s new collection of essays, Inciting Joy. What a beautiful book to read during the dark days of winter—or anytime. (You can get a bit of Ross Gay magic in his interview with OnBeing’s Krista Tippett.)
Another book I want to read is Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May. Katherine was also interviewed on OnBeing.