The Gift of Contradiction
How embracing our messy tensions can widen movements and deepen integrity
I eat meat. I fly on planes. And I care deeply about climate solutions.
For a long time, I thought these contradictions disqualified me. If I could just live without them.. go vegan, stop flying, fit all my trash into a single mason jar.. then maybe I would finally be a “real” climate activist. Maybe people would believe me more.
But when I sat with that thought, I realized what it meant: a movement shrunk down to the size of perfection.
A movement so narrow that only those who have purified their lives to the last detail are allowed to belong.
And I don’t want that. I want a movement wide enough for messy, ordinary, contradictory humans. Because that’s who we are.
Walt Whitman said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
Maybe we don’t need to erase contradiction, but to hold it. To let it stretch us into largeness.
When Twitter/X was sold to a billionaire, I told myself I’d never use it. I don’t want to support billionaires, I disagree with so much of what they represent. But after wrestling with it, I joined. Yes, AFTER it was sold.
Because when I really thought about my priorities, my goal is to flood the zone with climate solutions so that we can’t NOT look at them.
I realized that by not being on Twitter/X I was putting my desire to live a life with no contradiction ahead of my desire for flooding the zone with climate solutions, which is not aligned with my priorities.
Refusing to join out of principle wasn’t actually aligning me more deeply with my values, it was keeping me smaller.
Carl Jung wrote, “The paradox is one of our most valued spiritual possessions… it widens consciousness beyond the narrow confines of a tyrannical intellect.”
Contradiction can do that. It can break us out of brittle purity and widen our field of action.
It feels to me like sailing upwind.
You can’t just point the boat straight into the wind, you’ll stall. The sails flap uselessly and you go nowhere.
The only way forward is to tack, to zigzag back and forth, living in the tension between the boat and the wind. The contradiction doesn’t stop your progress. It makes it possible.
Engaged Buddhism calls this interbeing: the way joy and sorrow, anger and compassion, always arise together. Taoism says yin carries the seed of yang, and yang carries the seed of yin. We don’t resolve these tensions by picking one side. We move forward because they are both there.
This space is better when more people speak up. You’re welcome to join the conversation, however big or small your thoughts feel.
To hold paradox is to accept that life will never be tidy, that our values will pull us in different directions, that we will always be both more than and less than what we hoped to be.
The gift of contradiction is that it reminds us what actually matters.
Not the performance of purity, but the direction of our compass.
Not living a contradiction-free life, but living a life aligned with what we care most about.
If we can learn to live with contradiction, we might just widen our movements, deepen our integrity, and keep sailing toward the future we long for.
FYI: I also write For People and Planet, a weekly newsletter about climate solutions and the creativity driving them. If you’re curious, you can check it out here: forpeopleandpla.net
There is hypocrisy - of the sort modeled by billionaires who fly their private jets into global climate conferences where they still have the power to create the soundbites and set the narrative. And then there is paradox, contradiction. The reality that we exist within the systems that we wish to change. The reality that the half of a pig that my friends raised on their pasture and that just landed in my freezer has very little in common with the commodified units of meat production raised by the millions in conditions no living being should have to endure.
And it would seem that the billionaires rather prefer that us small folk get obsessed with purity. With keeping our lives small, with policing each others' diets, doing all of the right things and none of the wrong ones, and of course buying whatever greenwashed products and investments they can send down the pipeline.
I am most grateful for your holistic perspectives.