Without hope of resolution

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Recently, a young and gifted friend of mine asked me how she could find inner peace. She told me that one part of her wanted to be ambitious, to create masterworks and find her limits, and another part of her just wanted to accept everything, to relax into presence and joy. How could she reconcile these parts of herself, finding the perfect balance?

My answer is to give up immediately on that idea. There’s no reason to believe that you will find persistent balance between these conflicting elements of your psychology. There’s also no reason to believe such a thing is necessary. You can drive yourself crazy with ambition now, and relax later, or vice versa, or some fractal intertwining of both. Here’s what you do: just do what seems right based on the situation in front of you. Don’t worry, the correct choice will be obvious in retrospect, whether or not you select it.

Sure: some idiots will try to sell you a definitive answer, one way or the other. One brand of idiots will claim that pushing yourself is a bad thing, that great things only come without force. (Have they known any genuinely productive people?) Another brand of idiots will sell you on the necessity of constant discipline, of grinding until your last breath. (At some point they will do ayahuasca and have a psychedelic influencer arc.)

Clearly neither group of people is describing reality. They are just trying to sell you on some hope of persistent balance—of resolution.

There is a phrase from the writing of therapist Bruce Tift that, to me, is one of the most sanity-generating combinations of words in the English language. It is: “without hope of resolution.” If that phrase doesn’t wash over your whole tortured mind like a cool breeze, I don’t think you’re yet internalizing how beautiful and liberating it is.

Tift uses the phrase to describe his combination of Buddhist practice and Western psychotherapy. These traditions offer two contradictory perspectives: one tells you to stop believing the stories in your head and just accept the way things are in the moment. The other tells you to be a forensic scientist of your own mind, delving into the historical roots of behavioral patterns. One says forget about your identity, the other says debug it. How do you resolve this contradiction? Bruce Tift’s relaxing answer is basically: you don’t. Useful philosophies disagree with each other sometimes, and this is only an issue if you expect yourself, or reality, to be philosophically consistent. Where did you get that expectation?

He also uses it to describe the character of intimate relationships. You know how you long for closeness with your partner, and then you focus on connection, and then suddenly the air is damp and swampy with connection, so you want separation again? That’s not a problem. None of that is a problem. Because if you nullify that cycle, you don’t have a real relationship anymore. The only problem is some fictitious idea of relationships where your appetites are static. But people aren’t like that. We are basically cyclic. We freeze into roles because we need some predictability, but we’re also changing internally all the time, so our roles eventually become confining. Then we have to melt, only to freeze anew. We can either make room for this process in our relationships, without hope of resolution, or have a shitty marriage (a time-honored option, to be sure).

This all feels so fucking obvious? Like I feel silly writing this? And yet, I need this reminder myself, more often than I care to admit. The hope of resolution is a curiously persistent feature of the imagination. It’s so persistent that it may be creeping in as you read this. “Aha, I will now live without the hope of resolution—so I will never be disappointed in the future!” Congratulations, you have already lost the game. And you will again. Hopefully, you can give up on the hope of resolving this.

The hope of resolution makes a seductive promise. That one day, we will hit the exact balance point between the opposing virtues: dependability and spontaneity, openheartedness and independence, acceptance and judgement. That we will be rescued from constantly stumbling too far in one direction, noticing a bit too late, and then lurching in another. Perhaps, if we try hard enough, we can fully protect ourselves from living.

Thank you to Erin Shetron for editorial help. Photo credit goes to Daido Moriyama.