People who have not found their way to an embraceable sense of God often name this vastness of essence Truth. In this respect, God is Truth, the Truth inherent in everything as it is. Perhaps Truth is the common, irreducible presence found in all things, that mixture of light and stillness that we repeatedly find wherever we go—in the worn edges of stones, in the fallen bark of trees, in the winded eyes of strangers, and in the sigh of an elderly mind suffering through to its tenderness.

The most enigmatic and crucial paradox we encounter as human beings is suffering, which is such because of our ability to feel. Forms of nature that don’t feel, experience what we know as suffering as breaking, shedding, eroding, or decomposing. Yet who can say if other life forms can feel? If you can dismiss the possibility, it’s the same blinded form of thinking that will allow you to dismiss another person’s pain because you don’t recognize it.

Yet it’s also our ability to feel that enables us to experience wonder and bliss. This twin-edged capacity to feel is, in itself, a paradox, an aspect of God. Our ability to suffer and wonder is indicative of a larger presence that sustains the world with its cosmic heartbeat. Of course, our greatest challenge as human beings is to live in such a way that the wonder of feeling out-fuels the pain of breaking.

Not surprisingly, the aspect of feeling that has its hold on us dominates our view. As far back as 1750 BC, Enlil, the Babylonian deity of wind and storm, observes this in humans:

Mens’ spirits change like day and night;

When hungry, they are like corpses;

Filled, they count themselves equal to their god;

When things go well, they prate of mounting to heaven,

When in distress, they groan of descending to hell.

What is surprising is how for centuries we’ve been able to discount the other side of whatever we’re experiencing, as if to acknowledge joy while we’re suffering will make our suffering illegitimate, as if to acknowledge suffering while we’re content will undermine our peace.

Like a salve misplaced in the ruins of history, acknowledging both sides of the paradox we call feeling is a healing restorative, because the Whole in its fullness is more empowering than any one aspect, no matter how pleasant or quarantined from sadness that aspect might be.

While we are rightfully preoccupied with whatever befalls or uplifts us, its opposite is happening somewhere else at the same time–not minimizing our experience but complementing it. For every moment of love, there is somewhere a corresponding moment of loneliness. For every birth of possibility, there is a corresponding remnant of life decomposing.