Ugly and beautiful

My grandma passed away this summer, and the day she died was one of the most ugly and beautiful days of my life. 

We tend to live in a world that thinks and acts binarily. It’s either good or it’s bad, positive or negative, easy or hard. Yes, sometimes things are objectively one thing or another. It’s on or it’s off, hot or cold, long or short. But other times, and I’d argue most times, things are not just one thing because life usually isn’t that simple. Rather, things are both, multiple, or even seemingly conflicting things all at once. And we can feel confused, wrong, or even guilty when this happens because we tend to not be taught to feel beyond happy or sad. 

You just got promoted or just retired… aren’t you entirely excited? You just got married or just had a baby… aren’t you overwhelmed with joy? Maybe the answer is overwhelmingly yes! to any/all of these things or [insert whatever life event you’re experiencing.] Or, maybe the answer is yes and no because life is a little more complicated than that. 

When my grandma died, there was beauty in her peacefully passing in her own home of 50+ years surrounded by family and nature, exactly as she wished. And, there was devastation in the permanence of her no longer being with us, of my dad and aunt losing their mom, and my siblings and I, our last grandparent. Both of these things - gratitude and grief - were true.

Positive psychology teaches us that happiness and sadness, joy and sorrow, thrill and fear, excitement and nerves can all coexist. Feeling all of these things with honesty and curiosity (rather than guilt, denial, or judgment) is what it means to live well. In other words, we can challenge binary thinking by creating more spaces where both or many things can be true. In doing so, we more richly engage, more deeply feel, and thus, more fully live… both ugly and beautifuly.