The Battle Hymn of the Middle Way

On the power of paradox in life, love, and leadership

A ship hurtles through space, flames spreading across its hull. Cut to the bridge where a wide-eyed first officer announces that the highest (“beige”) alert has been sounded. The captain gravely surveys the crisis and responds: “If I don’t survive, tell my wife I said…hello.”

This is one of several delightful moments where we encounter the alien race the Neutrals on the show Futurama. Each joke centers on the same simple assumption: to be neutral is to be dull, lifeless, equivocal.

Most of us have been raised on this assumption. Who wanted to be Switzerland in World War 2? Even without the Nazi blood gold, how can you stand on the sidelines during such a clearly epochal battle between good and evil? In such times, you must find your courage, rise up, and fight. This has been the energy animating much of the world since at least 2016. You must pick a side and fight each battle as if the survival of the country and world depends on your victory. Anyone else is selfish, cowardly, worthy of the scorn channeled by Futurama’s notoriously incompetent swashbuckler, Zap Brannigan: “I hate these neutral people…with enemies you know where they stand. But with neutrals—who knows? It sickens me.”

It is a simple and common mental slide to equate neutrality and paradox. In our society, if I respond to a charged situation with nuance and complexity (“Yes, and…”), many will assume that I lack conviction, likely to sit idly and send bland messages to my wife as I die.

But, unlike neutrality, paradox is not an action or position. It is a method of thinking, a way of seeing the world. It is a worldview that has faded as we moderns have sanitized the world.  Reclaiming this worldview and developing the capacity to hold paradox in even the most difficult moments is, I believe, one of the central tasks of our age. It is the core of being a better leader, a better parent, a better spouse and citizen – a wholehearted human.

Contrary to the biases that the Neutrals personify, a life of paradox is a courageous path. It is a path of intense passions and emotions. It is a path to doing great works, to creating change that can improve the lives of millions.  It is the path to living a full life within all our beauty and brokenness.

If you are not with me yet, I encourage you to read on and strap yourself in because, unlike the Neutrals, I feel strongly about this. You may not join me on the path, but I hope I may convince you to proudly cultivate more paradoxical thinking throughout your life.

Welcome to the battle hymn of the middle way.

The Power and Peril of Paradox

Paradox is a fancy word that is, ironically, overused in modern discourse though we probably understand and embody it less than most humans who have come before us. It is the simple idea that two opposing truths can and do exist at the same time.

Our minds hate paradox. They evolved into exceptional splicing machines. Vast amounts of data flood at us every moment, which our brains almost instantaneously divide into two streams: good or bad; right or wrong; dangerous or safe; relevant or irrelevant. This process keeps us safe (cookie good, snake bad) and enables us to build lives in an endlessly complex world (most light and sound unimportant; document in front of me important). Without this incredible machine, we would remain babies staring wide-eyed at the endless technicolor majesty.

But that machine, by nature and necessity, lies to us. It tries to convince us that its division is truth, the only way to achieve the love, safety, and purpose we all crave, rather than the flawed coping mechanism it is. To hold paradox, we need to overcome this drive within our own skull. That is a hard and, at times, frightening journey, and we could live long, luxurious lives without ever really setting foot on it (as certain modern politicians demonstrate).  So why on earth would we declare war on our own brains in this way?

Richard Rohr crisply provides the answer: “We must learn to accept paradoxes, or we will never love anything or see it correctly.”

Try to find anything in the universe where an extreme is optimal. I’ll save you some time: there is nothing. Life is contradiction. We have known this for thousands of years. It is the foundation of Daoism and other Eastern faiths, and the beating heart of the mystical and contemplative wings of Western traditions (from Heraclitus to Merton). It is the core of physics, the quantum cloud within all this matter and light. 

Everything—yes, everything—contains seeds of both help and harm, good and bad, light and shadow. Water is the source of life. Drink too much of it and it will kill you. Same with gravity and oxygen and every other element of this astonishing Goldilocks zone. And it is the same with every aspect of the human mind and heart: we need some ambition to grow and create beautiful things. And our ambition, without equal parts of its opposite, contentment, can sow immense suffering and destruction.

You may already be preparing a set of counterexamples (Fascism! Kindness!) so let’s examine a case more closely, the one I find hardest: love.

As a parent, spouse, friend, and broken human, I believe unconditional love is the foundation of everything. We all deserve it and none of us can thrive without it. And…we all need conditional love and cannot thrive without it.

Alone, unconditional love leaves us spoiled and listless. Alone, conditional love leaves us endlessly insecure and grasping. We need them both woven tightly together into a net holding us above the abyss of existence, society, our minds. We need that paradoxical love from our family, friends, and colleagues. And we need it from ourselves, whispering to ourselves as we fall asleep each night: “I love you so much as you are, and you can do better.”

Fully holding those opposing forms of love at the same time is not for the faint-hearted. Sometimes the burden is lighter, such as when we must support our child to try harder in school. But all of us will be called into situations where the tension feels unbearable. Think of the mother described in David Brooks’ recent book who forgave and raised the boy who murdered her son. She is as far from both the cold, diffident Neutrals and the righteous screaming on Twitter as imaginable. Can we follow her path and summon unconditional love for our political opponents whose policies we loathe or the colleague who wounded us?

Everything that is good and beautiful in this world requires embracing this same interweaving of opposing forces. Everything is paradox.

Warriors of the Knife’s Edge

The paradoxical worldview does not lead to passivity and equivocation. Gandhi and Mandela were preachers of paradox, masters of the middle way and translating it into massive social change. Nobody would accuse them of sitting on the sidelines.

Consider Thich Nhat Hanh, one of the great modern teachers of this worldview. When war engulfed his country, he did not passively watch because paradox required him to consider the perspective of each side (or perhaps to tell the generals: “hello”). He devoted himself to stopping the fighting, risking his life. Many of the monks and nuns he led were killed. He was eventually exiled because his fierce opposition was considered too dangerous. And yet he viewed the conflict and its leaders and soldiers through the nuanced lens of the middle way as he illustrated in his best-known poem:

I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate.

And I am also the pirate,
my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving…

My pain is like a river of tears,
so vast it fills the four oceans.

Those last two lines capture why the paradoxical worldview requires such courage. It would have been easier for him to declare the soldiers and generals evil, irredeemable. Instead, he broke his heart wider open and unflinchingly held the pain and suffering on both sides even as he tried to end the violence.

This worldview is not just relevant to saints and generational leaders. It can shape our mundane lives, our little interactions and pivotal decisions.  

We may feel that we are already there in much of our life; after all most of us oppose violence and like to think of ourselves as open-minded. How are we different from Thich Nhat Hanh and other masters of paradox?

In short, mindset matters. It flows through our words and actions in small and powerful ways. Thich Nhat Hanh once told a monk I knew that he should leave the monastery because he had created his own personal hell. Those were hard words, strong conditional love, but they landed differently because they came from a mindset that also held unconditional love and deep understanding of who the monk fully was, his light as well as shadow.

His approach is at the heart of any leadership position. There are bosses whose tough words come from judgment and insecurity. You’ve probably met some of them and have no desire to ever work with them again. And then there are bosses who are master of simultaneously hugging and pushing. In his book The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle chronicles legendary NBA coach Greg Popovich. No care bear, Popovich is often seen scowling or yelling during practice and games. But his players report that they have never felt both more supported and more challenged in their lives. He is a master of viewing young people with a paradoxical mindset, of holding both unconditional and conditional love.

The paradoxical mindset also shapes how we approach policy and societal progress. Take a topic many of us care deeply about: climate change. Campaigns against nuclear energy reduced the risk of another Chernobyl, and dramatically accelerated global warming by increasing use of fossil fuels. Putin’s bloody invasion of Ukraine accelerated Europe’s shift to clean, renewable energy. Climate change is littered with these brutal reminders of the help and harm contained within everything. As I work in the field, I don’t let these paradoxes stop me from supporting certain solutions, but I try to always witness the risks and harms inherent within them.

Most of us struggle to hold that mindset as we argue with our family, critique our colleagues, or challenge our political opponents. I have too often slipped into self-righteousness and have seen many around me fall into the same trap. People feel our judgment, react to it, fueling their own dualistic instincts. There is no place in the paradoxical worldview for self-righteousness or sanctimony. When we clearly recognize the tensions, the opposing truths, in everything, we cannot see ourselves or our beliefs as better than others. All we can do is try to chart the best path through the endless flames of contradiction together.

Dancing on the knife’s edge of the middle way, courtesy of Bard. Tilt a little to one side and we tumble into the fires of certainty and extreme and self-righteousness.

How do we cultivate that paradoxical mindset throughout our lives? How do we hold fast to it even in the most searing moments, like that mother witnessing her son’s murderer?

I will focus many of my coming reflections on those questions. In particular, I will explore how we can learn to hold—how to be—these dyads at the same time:

·      Gentle and fierce

·      Enough and not enough

·      Humble and confident

·      Hopeful and hopeless

·      Skeptical and intuitive  

Each of these alone is fiendishly hard to hold. And there are many more such tensions that shape our lives. Once you start seeing the world with the mindset of the middle way you realize these paradoxes are everywhere and inescapable. In fact, and this is where things begin to really bake your noodle, truly holding paradox also means recognizing that there is no paradox. The unfettered fires of the extreme also belong in life and society. But for those of us immersed in Western dualistic rationalism and raised on modern myths of heroic excess (from Jobs to Jagger), we have a long way to go in developing our capacity for mundane paradox before we need bite into that mental ghost pepper.

This is a lifelong path. There are no shortcuts, no hacks. There will never be a Buzzfeed “Follow These Three Bullets to Master Paradox” (and please don’t click on it if there is). All we can do is lean into the tensions, to refuse to fall apart into the easy, shallow poles. We will fail and fall again and again, but, if we try, we will slowly get a little better at dancing on the knife’s edge that rests in the middle of all things.

As always, the steps on that grand, confounding path are painfully simple. Every one of us can take them today. To start, all we need to do is notice the next time we feel the fires of righteousness and certainty spread through our mind and body (fueled by that policy, that person), then pause and ask ourselves:

And? And can I see the opposites that they also contain?

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