The Healing Power of Paradox

It took me years to accept that I was sick.

Living with a chronic illness has taught me many valuable skills, although it took me years to discover them. Slowly and painfully, I was forced into new ways of relating to the world. One of the teachings I most value is the ability to accept paradox.

After fighting for years against the fact of being sick, I landed in the hospital with a life-threatening flare that had been caused partly by my own denial of my frailty. Forced to surrender at last, I finally acknowledged that I was a Sick Person, not the Healthy Person I’d been all my life. I needed to cater more to my body’s special needs.

And yet, I also needed a way to be sick and not sick. In the pain-wracked weeks and months of my health crisis, an insight emerged from the tangles of my mind: I was sick, but at the same time, “sick” could not be who I was.

My denial about my frailty had endangered me, but it also held a kernel of truth I still wanted to honor. Thinking of myself as sick wasn’t healing. It matters how we see ourselves, and my instinct had rebelled against seeing myself as sick.

I needed to finally accept that I was sick, but also to keep seeing beyond my sickness. To accept that I was limited, yet not feel bound by limitations. And after wrestling with this, I landed on an answer at last: that the key was letting go of my either-or mentality and embracing paradox instead.

I needed to accept and reject my illness. I was sick, but not a Sick Person. I was limited, yet still boundless. I had an incurable disease, but I still hoped for a cure.

As soon as I recognized this way forward, I felt an immense burden lift. I’d been struggling against two realities that had seemed, to my logical mind, to be mutually exclusive. The trick was to loosen my logic. This was about survival and meaning; it didn’t have to be about math.

I could pick and choose which truths to accept in which moments. I could plan meals around my special diet, decline invitations in order to rest, and spend a year preparing for a simple backpacking trip I could have once done on a whim. And all the while, I could keep my eyes on the horizon, where they belonged. I could still see myself as expansive, healthy, and free.

Paradox expands the mind.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said:

[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

I love his depiction of paradox, and I believe the intelligence he’s referring to is learned, not something we either have or don’t have. Most people, with time and experience, can learn to break out of either-or thinking and expand our minds.

Western culture, with our foundations in logic dating back to the ancient Greeks, tends toward either-or thinking. But modern psychological techniques such as dialectical behavior therapy help us broaden into non-dualistic thinking that’s less rigid and black-and-white.

When we discover the beauty of paradox, new worlds open up. Parker Palmer writes:

In a paradox, opposites do not negate each—they cohere in mysterious unity at the heart of reality. Deeper still, they need each other for health, as my body needs to breathe in as well as breathe out. But in a culture that prefers either-or thinking to the complexities of paradox, we have a hard time holding opposites together.

Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

While paradox isn’t typically embraced in Western culture, many Eastern and mystical traditions do recognize its value. Sixth-century Buddhist patriarch Jianzhi Sengcan said, “The struggle between ‘for’ and ‘against’ is the mind’s worst disease.” And Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian mystic and poet, captured paradox in this heart-opening poem:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.

The world is full of beautiful paradoxes.

Once I learned to embrace paradox with my illness, I began to see that letting go of either-or is the key to peace and progress in many realms of life.

In fraught relationships, healing often comes from the ability to hold both anger and love at the same time. Healthy boundaries require the expression of anger or hurt, or saying a clear “No,” while still also expressing love for the other and the self.

In politics, healthy democracy involves a similar tension. We must learn to respect others’ viewpoints even when they directly contradict our own. We must recognize the possibility of multiple conflicting truths. And at other times, we must find ways to love and respect our fellow citizens even when we know they’re just plain wrong.

I believe there’s another important paradox in the way society ought to deal with illness. Normalizing illness is the humane and compassionate way to treat people like me who are chronically ill—this blog is largely about humanizing the sick. But at the same time, when we normalize illness we may appear to accept it as inevitable.

“I don’t like the idea of ‘cancer awareness,’” my friend once said. “There’s a new cancer awareness wing of the student union building. Why do we always talk about cancer awareness? Where’s the talk about cancer prevention?”

Like me, this friend has ulcerative colitis. Both cancer and colitis are probably often preventable, but addressing prevention in the presence of the sick can feel like victim-blaming. What’s needed is to recognize the humanity and needs of ill people and work to prevent more people “like us”—i.e., to prevent more illness in the future. By embracing the paradox inherent in these two endeavors, we can gracefully do both.

And here’s one more paradox. I am so grateful for this wisdom that my illness has given me. And at the same time, right alongside that gratitude, I still wish I had never gotten sick. My logical mind wants a definitive answer on this. Would I rather be sick and wise, or healthy?

But then I remember the power of paradox. I don’t need to choose. There is space within me for both.