Paradoxical thinking—a buzzword that's become helpful for (re)framing a variety of the problems that occur in our lives. It means being able to hold two, seemingly contradictory concepts simultaneously. I don't recall often hearing this term before COVID changed our world. Now though, it repeatedly pops up in news, in reading, in conversation, usually as a tool to reconsider how we may best face the continual challenges, big and small, that the pandemic has wrought (or made worse). Uncertainty, loss, pain, anger—a bevy of emotions that are difficult to feel one at a time, let alone all at once, repeatedly, over and over, like ocean waves crashing against a battered, rocky coastline. These mucky, weighty feelings have become all too "normal" to really seem normal, especially this semester.
As I wrote in the fall, I find myself sitting in a chasm of deep, profound grief for the losses we as a Yale community—and I as Xán, and you as you, reader—have experienced. Sitting in red hot anger, worked up at witnessing the grossness of hate and violence that pervades our world and our nation. Sitting in utter exhaustion, trying to push against stymied institutions, national and local, public and private, to do something, anything, that actually feels like help. But just as tidal forces crush, erode, and sweep away parts of the coast, so too is it true that the same coast is home to myriad ecosystems, shielded away in the eddies and nooks that swirl and carve out a home amongst the rocks. So too does some 40% of humanity live within 100 km of a coastal zone. Life is drawn to and even proliferates at this natural boundary, which yet gravely threatens it (a fact given whole new meaning in this age). I've learned to lean more and more on the daily reminders of unshakeable love and light persevering—spring's warm, sunny arrival coming not a day too early of course, but also vaccination efforts speeding up, friends and loved ones knitting together even tighter than before, people doing and places enduring and life transforming to become, somehow, even more precious. And that helps to hold the weary, battered, but steady gaze fixed on the horizon.