170: because you can feel both joy and grief

This life is full, friends.

This life is full of joy. This life is full of grief. And this full life is full of joy and grief at the same damn time.

We live in a world that constantly asks us to choose between the ocean and the shore, without any room to go wading or collect water-tossed shells.

But we don’t have to reject grief, or deny its existence, to feel joy.

I’m starting to believe the opposite: I feel more joy when I accept it right alongside the grief. When I open myself up to the discomfort of feeling “conflicting” feelings, I realize how much there is to do at the fucking beach.

Am I losing you with the beach analogy? Let me turn, as always, to poetry. Specifically, Elizabeth Gilbert’s favorite poet:

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine.
…
To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

Jack Gilbert, A Brief for the Defense

I must accept my grief, and treat it with compassion and genuine interest. Because if–in this full, full life–I can feel grief and joy at the same damn time, then I can choose one or the other to be the focus of my day.

It’s not about rejecting grief; it’s about choosing joy.