Paradox of life

​




​


​
​The fall season is a great metaphor of change. The beautiful, vibrant, glorious changing of the season signaled by the colors of fall leaves. The display of yellow, orange, red leaves appear because the trees and plants are breaking down their green pigment(chlorophyll) which then reveals other colorful pigments. The shorter daylight hours and cooler temperatures stop the plant from producing chlorophyll. This change, cues to the trees and plants, that they need to get ready for winter dormancy.  Nature instinctively goes through these cycles of life and death and rebirth: paradoxes of life.

---

When I find myself in these places of life transitions, as I did this summer, it’s an invitation for me to take a moment of pause, take a deep breath, and metabolize these changes. These life transitions remind me that we live in a multitude of paradoxes.  The idea of both/and of living: joy/sorrow, giving/receiving, embracing/letting go, grace/accountability, and life/death. It’s hard to hold the paradoxes of life and not allow myself to polarize what might feel like opposing emotions and thoughts. Simultaneously, holding the tension of two opposing ideas, causes great discomfort.  Because of this great discomfort, I believe we are conditioned to focus either only on the positive or only on the negative and we do not handle the paradoxes of life well.  How do we hold the tension of both/and, not only for ourselves but those who we are in relationship with individually and communities we are in? The paradoxes of life, enables us to experience the richness and fullness of life and can draw us together to support each other in our humanness.

As I think about my relationship with my mom for most of my life, I had no relationship with my mom.  After my parents divorced, my siblings and my dad moved to the US( from South Korea) and from that point on, we were forbidden to have contact with her. My siblings and I  reunited with our mom about 20 years ago. When we reunited, there was such an elation of finding her and being able to reconnect with her AND there was also immense sorrow of the time that had been lost and her absence. At the end of June, she suffered a stroke and her ability to coherently communicate verbally was impacted.  For most of July, we were able to be in Daegu, South Korea to coordinate my mom’s long-term with extended family. We were able to visit her and support her through this frustrating transition, where her body and mind was adjusting to a new normal. So with her, we hold onto hope that she will recover some of her faculties to verbally communicate and be independently mobile and also having to let go and come to terms with a “new normal” that her life and our ability to connect with her will be different.
In these places of life changes, there’s also grief and loss. Letting go of the known, to allow ourselves to move into a new chapter.  Oftentimes, it’s hard to let go of what has been familiar and predictable to embrace the unknown and uncomfortable. Our mom, who is a loving, tender-hearted, stubborn, funny, independent,  and able-bodied person; now many of these qualities may be severely impacted. Again we find ourselves needing to release what we have known of her and embrace the new version of her.
Change is uncomfortable, scary, unpredictable.  Change can also be exciting, helps us grow, and invigorates our lives. It’s an invitation for making a pivot to the possibilities: of a new chapter, reviving a different part of ourselves, and living with a different perspective that transforms how we live and experience life differently.  
I’m unsure at the moment, what the paradox of change with my mom holds for me. And I do want to be open to experience, the both/and fully.

​