Between the Dark and the Daylight: Encountering and Embracing the Contradictions of Life Read Online Free PDF

routine, an exercise in a string of tomorrows just like our string of yesterdays.
    But if we listen with a clearer ear to the voices of the soul when panic sets in, we may hear a different kind of message. We may come to understand that there are burdens that come with certainty as well as the promise of blessings.
    It is possible, the heart tells us, that in our search for certainty we may be missing the graces that come with its attendant reality, fortuity.
    The search for certainty always puts us in the position of having to foreclose on options that, however unsure or risk-laden, might even be better for us in the long run. Doing what we want to do rather than what we are sure can garner us a sure life in a sure place for a sure amount of time may actually be the more joyful, more fulfillingroute for us. Then, we might be able to go to bed happy, alive with potentiality, rather than weighed down by the elusiveness of certainty.
    When we opt for certainty, we make change inconceivable. When change comes unbidden and without our permission, it looks more dangerous than daring, more of an enemy than a liberator. The very intrusion of the unanticipated into our well-planned lives stands to shake life to its very foundations. Rather than simply invite us to move on to even more growthful pastures than the bogs into which we’ve settled, change that is unwanted, unexpected, unwelcomed threatens the very fiber of our lives.
    Certainty, for all its guarantees, demands a subservient companion. It comes at the price of both liberty and creativity. It nails our feet to the floor and calls it success.
    The wisdom of the night is a hard one to bear, perhaps, but the very matter of our discontent at the thought of change tells us that there are other lessons to learn in life. Mignon McLaughlin writes, “It’s the most unhappy people who most fear change.” We must come to understand that dullness is itself an irritant of the soul and it is the very uncertainty of certainty that prods us to grow.
    It is the spirit of invention and possibility to which uncertainty calls us. What uncertainty brings us to is the security that comes with knowing that we finally developed in ourselves the ability to grow, to adjust, to become.

6
T HE F RAGILITY OF A CHIEVEMENT
    There are ways of saying it on the streets that are less elegant than professionals might phrase it, perhaps, but it’s difficult to say it better than the clichés: “What goes up must come down” is one kind of popular wisdom. Another says it a bit more subtly maybe but just as wisely: “Remember that the people you meet on the way up you’ll meet again on the way down.” The point is clear: Power and status are movable feasts. Nobody holds either of them forever or for sure. Negotiating between the two ends of the social scale is one of the major challenges of life, a mark of mental health and, in the long run, a measure of our happiness.
    The social scale is a two-way street. The fact is that people go both up and down the social scale, inexorably, in every arena, always. These are the people who have become “famous” at whatever social level for some reason and then discovered the difficulty that fame brings.
    Sometimes they’re celebrities with unusual talent who outlived the talent that brought them to public attention and found themselves off the charts, off the stage, outside the social circle they had come to take for granted.
    Sometimes they’re politicians whose personal charisma swept them into public office but then suffered the disappointment of constituents whose expectations they could not meet.
    Sometimes they’re just people like you and I who were local company CEOs and had a change of personal fortune. In many cases they were trusted businesspeople who steered a local company into bankruptcy. Often they are anyone who has achieved some kind of public recognition or responsibility and then wakes up one morning to find out that the committee has been