If I am here for anything, it seems that what I am here for is to wrestle in the space between: to stand in the grey areas, to make friends with the discomfort of not knowing, of not being sure, of holding both. If there is such a thing as truth, this is where it will be found - in the place of limbo, in the space between.
There is an irony to this being the location of my purpose. There has always been something in me that wants, more than anything, to have certainty, to be able to know something is absolutely true. I have a deep and perhaps insatiable yearning to know where I stand, to have arrived, to get to finally stand on the solid ground of a truth that will not change, a knowing that is finite, concrete, unmoving.
And yet, where I find myself landing, time and again, is in a place where the only truth that makes sense is one that holds uncertainty, one that makes space for all the things that I do not and cannot know, one that exists as paradox.
When I was in graduate school I was introduced to the work of the artist and educator Maxine Greene. She wrote about the idea of becoming, of being on the way with questions still unanswered, of being… not yet. Something about her work struck a chord with me, though at first it was a dissonant chord. My initial reaction to hearing her speak about the beauty of continuing to discover who she was well into her elder years was one of exasperation. Sill discovering who she was… Not there yet!
In my early twenties, I was doing so much work to figure out who I was, to land in the knowing of what I was here for. I wanted nothing more than to arrive in the life that was for me, to arrive in the me that I was meant to be. I felt so close to knowing who I was, narrowing in so precisely on what it was that I was here for, on what my life’s work was meant to be. I had such clear knowings at that time in my life that being confronted with the notion that those knowings might change, might evolve, might be wrong, was a disruption I was not ready to embrace.
But it stuck with me. It was a powerful enough sentiment that even though the note was discordant, I could tell that it was one to hold on to, that there was something in it that was already speaking to me, if perhaps a part of me that was hanging out in the background, not yet ready to drive the ship of my life.
The place where this chord struck was the part of me that was already familiar with the space between, that already had spent some time in the land of limbo, that already was wrestling with the very idea of certainty and a singular notion of truth. It turned out that her words, and work, and example, were exactly the thing I needed to give that part of me permission to continue exploring, to continue questioning the things I thought I knew, to continue imagining beyond the scope of where the me who knew, was willing to look.
I credit that part of me, and the influence she had on it, with my ability to navigate the hard moments that were waiting around the corner. This part of me that was strengthened by her words, became the part of me that could find comfort in that place we call limbo, that could stand strongly in the midst of the unknown, that embraced and learned to relish the mysteries that we will never understand, that came to accept paradox as the only way to experience reality.
Today when I reflect on the space between, on the gift that standing in that space offers, I think first about my relationship to conflict, about my understanding of conflict as being a manifestation of the fiction that we are separate from each other, about the paradoxical way that conflict can feed the myth of separation and also debunk it.
The version of me that found discordance in Maxine Greene’s perspective was also a version of me that was not very comfortable with conflict. My certainty did not play well with the discomfort of truly taking in other perspectives, with embracing the humility required to imagine that I might, perhaps, be wrong. That version of me tended towards avoiding conflict in the same way I avoided the unknown. That part of me was wrapped up in being right, in centering my righteousness, in exaggerating the fiction of separation by creating clear distinctions between myself and the people with whom I did not agree, by holding tightly to the truth of my perspective, and to its obviousness, its infallibility.
It was through spending time in the space between, spending time getting comfortable in the discomfort of the unknown, that I began letting go of my attachment to the rightness of my perspectives, that I built in myself the ability to imagine a place beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, that I came to value the truth of connection over the attachment I had to my perspective being the truth. It is through that process of sitting together in the discomfort of the space between, that we can come to see separation we believe to be between us as a myth, as truly non-existent. And it is through that process that I have seen conflict used as an opportunity to bring us closer, to dissolve that myth of our separation.