How to Outgrow a Paradox

I am, just like you, a field of opposites. I spend my life navigating between poles, trying to balance and grow and get through difficult shit without leaning too far to one side and tipping over.

What fascinates me about opposites, about polarities, is that they’re different for everyone.

Sure, there are some polarities that almost all of us share and can feel, pairings like

• Masculine/Feminine,

• Truth/Lie,

• Individuality/Belonging,

• Love/Fear

We might imagine these pairings as spectrums or poles, with one concept on one side and the other on the opposite, like this:

But there are also polarities and pairings that are specific to a given person. If you asked a dozen people for the opposite of Freedom, I don’t think anyone would say Integrity — and yet that’s a polarity I’ve been striving with all year. How to be more free and liberated while staying in integrity, how to stay in integrity without curtailing or denying my freedom.

Any given concept, feeling, or value can have nearly infinite opposites, depending on the way your Being is arranged; depending on what kind of development needs to happen inside you. With Freedom, for example, you might feel it in direct tension with Order, or with Chaos, or Duty, or a dozen other things. Any given concept has a vast number of possible opposites. The space looks more like this:

And for any given individual, any number of different polarities might be the ones that are “active” in their system — the ones their lives are built around. The other polarities might seem irrelevant or even invisible to them.

This gets very very messy when you let other people define polarities for you. If you simply trust them that “the opposite of fear is love” for example — they might not be wrong, but if that polarity isn’t the opposition that’s active in your own life, then you’re just wasting time mimicking someone else’s growth. It’s like a rose bush trying to take advice about growing roots from an oak, or from moss — it’s just not a useful endeavor.

Which is unfortunate, because working with your own true polarities is one of the most important endeavors in life — especially any life that’s aimed at growth and development.

Paradox & Polarity

Polarities often show up as paradoxes, as catch-22s, knots that are impossible to resolve. This happens when we reach a far border of our development. These paradoxes are the gateways beyond those borders.

From the inside, the polarity looks unresolvable, tautologically so. Chaos and Order are so obviously opposites, it’s literally impossible to resolve them, and yet you have to; life itself is forcing you to find a way to do it — how the fuck is that fair or possible?

From the outside, from the place where you’ve resolved the paradox and can stand outside of it, it’s just… obvious. There were no vast calculations or strategies needed, the paradox simply is, it’s all fine, it all makes sense. Why did it ever look so hard?

Carl Jung wrote about this a lot:

The greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble. They must be so, for they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They can never be solved, but only outgrown.

Every paradox is an invitation to outgrow its inherent polarity.

How do we do that?

Follow the Friction, Follow the Fear

Last year, Sovereignty started feeling very alive. As I worked on it, I realized how closely tied it was to Masculinity for me. Pretty quickly, this exploration opened up some realizations: mainly that I have a pretty pronounced (and pretty underdeveloped) Feminine polarity inside me, and that it wanted my attention.

This felt weird and scary and off. Being a straight man in my 30s felt like a very weird starting point for an exploration of my feminine side. Some voice inside me started throwing out worries that I’d end up being weird; all sorts of fears that opening up even a small exploration into femininity would snowball into something that took over my whole life, completely erasing my masculinity and leaving me an incongruously girly 6’2 30-something.

In my experience, this is the first thing that happens when a polarity opens up: whichever side of the polarity you favor, it’s going to lie to you and tell you that if you take a single step towards the other pole, you’ll end up taking a thousand steps and get stuck there forever. (Ironically, listening to this voice is how you actually get stuck.)

Eg- If you are a very organized person, and start feeling an urge to loosen up and be less perfectionist, something inside of you will say “no no no, next thing you know your whole life will be chaos, you’ll skip meetings and get into day drinking and get fired — if you loosen your grip, everything you’re holding together will fall apart.”

I’ve seen, heard, and felt so many versions of this by now that I can pretty confidently say: that doesn’t happen. I’ve never seen any version of that happen in a significant way for a significant period of time. In some cases, the pendulum might swing a little further than you’d like — but then guess what happens next? It swings back. It might feel like you’re wandering off into the wilderness, but what you’re actually doing is calibrating within a pretty well-defined space.

Still, those fears are good, those fears are useful. They’re amazing sign-posts.

Where your fear is, there your task is.

— Carl Jung

When these totalizing fears get triggered, it’s a pretty good sign that you’re onto something. You can take small steps or you can take big swings, but one way or another, leaning into that fear is a good way to get things moving.

It might be helpful to give yourself a range of options. Write down the smallest possible step you could do to lean into the fear. Then write down the biggest swing you can imagine, something that feels unthinkable. Then go back to the other side of the spectrum, what’s a small but more noticeable step you could take? Then back to a large, but less-intense step? Keep calibrating until you find some steps near the edge of your comfort zone.

Polarities Expand Each Other

The trick with polarities and paradoxes is that when you let your life energy flow into them, the poles open each other up.

Taking a very slight exploration into masculinity opened up a small exploration into femininity. That exploration into femininity opened up more space in my masculine side, and when I stepped into that expanded masculine presence, it led me right back to deeper feminine expression, which opened up deeper masculine presence with opened up more lively feminine expression which opened up…

These expansions are natural and unavoidable, each small step opening up the next slightly larger step from the opposite side.

You walk by putting your left leg forward, which provides leverage to swing your right leg forward, which swings your left leg forward, which…

For a clearer example of how this can work: I naturally tend towards the Integrity side of the above spectrum — holding myself to a standard where I can be counted on to keep my word and to be reliable for myself and others. I want to be counted on, I want to provide structural love and safety for the people in my life.

At a certain point, this (duh) starts to feel bad. When I’m not fully aligned with what I want, my integrity takes on a forced quality. So when I started moving towards Freedom — allowing myself to cancel commitments and dynamics that felt bad for me — it was immensely clarifying. I suddenly got a little more in touch with my real desires, with what I actually wanted, with what did and didn’t feel good.

Once my desire was a bit more clarified, a new layer of integrity naturally opened up. I was able to be in deeper integrity, because I knew better what I actually wanted, and what I needed to say no to. Deepening into this, a greater sense of freedom opened up — when my integrity was more lithe and dependable, I could follow my desires and needs even further, knowing they were a part of my integrity, not competitors against it.

Now, I’m still in that Freedom-Integrity spiral, and I trust it to play out how it needs to play out. I’m excited about the paradox unwinding itself bit by bit.

This dynamic seems to generalize. When you sense a polarity or paradox inside yourself, you can usually sense which side of it is more comfortable for you — in my case, Masculinity and Integrity. You can start by pushing yourself in that direction even further, while paying attention to the ways it starts to grind or feel uncomfortable, or the way it opens up the longing for something else.

Once that longing (and probably fear) creeps in, move to the other side of the polarity. Lean into it as much as you’re able, with an attitude of genuine wonder, curiosity, and openness to what it looks like — and with a deep trust that your system knows how to navigate it. At some point, you’ll notice a natural opening back on the other side of the polarity, and you can follow that wherever it goes. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

---

From a certain perspective, there’s no such thing as a paradox or polarity. In the parable of the blind men and the elephant, they we might imagine them lamenting the paradox of the tail and trunk — how they’re so similar yet so different, and in opposite directions. It seems impossible when they hear it’s all the same thing, an elephant. So they make their way back and forth, from trunk to tail to trunk to tail — until, after enough trips, they’ve absorbed the shape of the whole elephant into their mental model. There’s no paradox, it’s just… an elephant. Duh. Why was that so hard to see?

But from the inside, these polarities can be a massive source of frustration and pain. Their paradoxes form the edges of our worlds. We can’t see or feel or move any further until we’ve changed the shape of ourselves to accommodate them.

The paradox doesn’t resolve — you do. And you do it by following your fear and stepping into what opens, over and over again.