The Courage to Hold Paradox

We humans crave certainty.
It’s wired into us.

Black-and-white thinking gives us the illusion of safety: right/wrong, in/out, us/them. In a world that feels unstable, it offers something solid to stand on. And in many cases, it serves us well: red lights mean stop, contracts mean security, rules keep order.

But certainty has a cost. It flattens complexity, stripping reality of its richness.

The deeper truth? Life is filled with paradox. We want freedom and belonging. We long for stability and change. We search for truth and mystery. Growth comes when we stop forcing ourselves to choose and instead learn to hold both.

Take religion. I recently saw a post about my own faith that posed two questions:
“Would you leave the church if you found clear evidence it was false? Would you join if you found clear evidence it was true?” One spoke to those still within, the other to those who had left.

It struck me because both questions live inside a binary: true/false, faithful/faithless. But what if you discovered it was both true and false? How might you hold that paradox in a culture only trained for black/white thinking? Lived faith is rarely as simple as either/or. It is at once sacred and flawed, wounding and healing, binding and liberating. Standing in the paradox opens the door to experiencing it more fully.

The same is true in other areas of life. In psychology, growth often comes when we integrate shadow and essence. In leadership, the real art is balancing short-term results with long-term vision. In culture, we need to learn that two seemingly opposing truths can both be real.

And yet, our society is allergic to paradox.
Politics reduces us to left vs. right.
Religion reduces us to orthodox vs. heretic.
Work pushes us into a false choice: exhaust yourself or disengage.

We’ve been trained to see through binaries, but rarely to stand inside tension. And without that capacity, we get stuck—unable to move beyond the old arguments, unable to see the bigger picture that only emerges when we hold both.

So here’s the question I’m wrestling with, and maybe you are too:
How do we hold paradox in a culture addicted to black-and-white thinking?

It’s not about finding the perfect answer. It’s about cultivating an inner spaciousness where opposites don’t cancel each other out, but actually deepen one another.

Paradox isn’t a problem to solve. It’s a capacity to cultivate.

And in my experience, the leap forward begins with the courage to stand inside that tension without collapsing back into either/or.