Blog

Tension of Opposites

• November 2011
• Simple Living Travel

Hello Steph,

I had recently written to you about missing the mountains due to my job, but I am writing on a slightly different topic today. It’s okay if you haven’t read to my other email yet, I’m sure you are quite a busy person!!

I just finished your book today as I was waiting for my car to get fixed, and your last two paragraphs reminded me of this quote I came across one day that sort of stuck with me. It is from Parker Palmer’s book called “The Courage to Teach” and the quote (of a quote) is as follows:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves…..Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer” – Parker Palmer

You wrote, “In some ways it seems like the answer is buried inside the question, and maybe I’ll never be able to pull them apart. Maybe I shouldn’t even try”. I read this and I think of this quote in Parker Palmer’s book. There are so many questions to life and I think this quote is similar to your first sentence – the question seems to be part of the answer. If we live seeking only answers, perhaps we forget that the question is such a great part of life as well. The question is like the journey, and the answer is like the destination. We must live in the journey and not wait to live until we reach the answer. Live everything. Live and love the simple things, as we must live in the hard things as well. And I think that perhaps, by living in questions, we all may one day live into those answers and perhaps find answers that we didn’t even know we had questions to. Maybe they answers are really buried inside the question and maybe we shouldn’t try to hard to pull them apart. Maybe its like cams, maybe the harder we try to pull it out the more it resists, so to speak.

It is a few years after your book and I am sure you have lived your way into several answers you did not have when you were writing, but it is great literature and great people that spark such honest and important questions and thoughts into my life. Perhaps by sharing them back with you it will lead to more questions and more answers – and I’m not sure if either are more important than the other.

Parker devotes a section of his book to paradox, or this tension of opposites. I find that climbing can have a lot of these, such as the dual feelings of solitude and community, the feelings of freedom and vulnerability, of challenge and flow, fear and tranquility, questions and answers. He writes on the nature of living in these paradoxes (although not climbing specifically) and the tensions that can come from them. For instance, when you were describing your climb as the feeling of forcing your way up a wall, when what you really wanted were the times where it is that peaceful flow. He calls such tensions suffering, and states, “such suffering is neither to be avoided nor merely to be survived but must be actively embraced for the way it expands our own hearts”.

This sentence particularly stuck with me when I read it and somewhat pangs me every time I see it – in fact, sometimes it makes me want to cry. I’m not sure if I can fully describe what this says to me or what I think it means, but when I come across those hard spots in life it makes me think that those difficult times aren’t for nothing. I shouldn’t avoid challenges altogether and I shouldn’t “merely survive” them either, but I should value the challenge for the way it forces me to grow, and adapt, and become a better person. So maybe we shouldn’t avoid those really hard climbs, or suffer through them, but live in them and keep ourselves open to the ways we can grow throughout the journey.

These are just my thoughts, and whether they be similar, different, or completely opposite of yours, I hope my letter to you has provided you with something more than the passing of time – your book has certainly been more than that for me.

By the way, I think it is fitting that the cover of Palmer’s book has this big beautiful rock face on the cover with these round stones in a lake in the foreground. Maybe he feels, as I like to feel, that the answers to these questions are just as much found in the natural world as they are in our minds.

Thanks Steph,
All the best,
Emily

Dear Emily,
Your ideas really hit home at the moment, and it’s so good to hear different perspectives on this eternal question. Waiting for cars to get fixed is somehow often a very reflective time 🙂
Thank you for writing to me!
🙂 Steph