I’ve been thinking about this song from Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood lately, as I’m wrestling with not a small degree of confusion about how we will restart school again in the fall. The whole thing is worth listening to—and marveling at, for its contribution to making it so much easier to raise humans now than it was 30 years ago—but here’s the two most important lines:
Sometimes you feel two feelings at the same time
And that’s okay.
I don’t know about you, but I do not remember receiving this message from even one friendly tiger, owl or human in my neighborhood. I think I learned the word “ambivalent” in college. Even then, I thought it was used for things you didn’t really care about, or perhaps contentious issues that had equally valid points on both sides, like whether jean jackets should be cropped or fall at the hip. Judge not, lest ye wear high-waisted harem pants.
I was in my 30s before I understood the lesson The Fred Rogers Company gifted my children as preschoolers: ambivalence means you will sometimes hold two contradictory feelings in your heart simultaneously, and that’s okay.
We are trained in childhood to see dichotomies, either/ors, opposites. That is an appropriate place to start thinking, there in the concreteness of hot and cold, day and night, but…we gotta graduate to nuance, ya’ll, preferably somewhere around our middle school years. And most people do learn to hold certain tensions in their minds. We mostly come to accept, for example, that many world leaders have admirable skills BUT would not make great friends. Or that Google is extremely useful AND is slowly subsuming civilization. Or that Benedict Cumberbatch kind of looks like an alien Burberry model AND powers the sun when photoshopped with kittens. As long as we’re looking at ideas far enough removed from ourselves, like preferably on an island so remote and so surrounded by predatory marine life we couldn’t swim to it if we tried, we can all tolerate some shades of gray.
It’s in our interior worlds where the nuance gets thornier. The voice in your head is more of a black and white thinker, right? If it’s anything like mine, I would guess it’s also probably a jerk.
I either want to be with my kids all the time, or I’m a bad parent. I either say yes to everything at work, or I’m not a team player. I either start listening to country crossovers, or I don’t deserve these Backstreet Boys tickets.
Give yourself permission for some inner ambivalence, for not everything you feel to be mutually exclusive with something else. Daniel Tiger hath decreed it. You can love your children intensely AND want to spend time alone. You can care about your job AND draw boundaries around yourself. You can want to crash through a series of walls when you hear Florida Georgia Line AND wear your Millenium t-shirt with pride.
More topically, you can be deeply concerned about the state of the economy AND hesitant to eat at a restaurant.
That’s all okay.
This week, as I listened to the folks at 1A discussing how to reopen schools in the fall, I had to deploy some extreme ambivalence affirmations. IT IS OKAY, I reminded myself, that I am both hopeful to return to my classroom AND reluctant to leave behind this quiet quarantine existence. IT IS OKAY that I am excited about settling into our new building AND nauseated by my inability to plan for August. IT. IS. OKAY that I want to see kids in person BUT am also worried about seeing them in person.
We’re allowed to be both/ands. You’re complicated and fascinating, full of contradictions, and that’s the best thing about you, like Pema Chodron says: “Our brilliance, our juiciness, our spiciness, is all mixed up with our craziness and our confusion.”
So if you’re like me and your inner voice sometimes tries to tell you otherwise, to be simpler and less interesting than you are, tell it to take a hike to the Land of Make Believe. When it gets back, you two can spend some time speculating about what might have happened to O the Owl’s parents, and then make sure you call me, because I have some theories.
