I’d Rather Be Whole Than Good
Stop Trying to Be One Thing
Think about how much of life is spent trying to be one thing, while pushing away something else. You want to be good, it means you got to push away all the bad. You want to be spiritual, you need to calm all the desire. You want to be calm, you need to get over the fire in you.
But what if the work isn’t to be one thing at all? What if it’s to be everything - the invitation I make here is simple but radical: To be both terrible and kind. Terrified and fearless. Stingy and generous.
The reconciliation we need is to let both sides of our character coexist within the whole of our consciousness.
The Cost of Division
This constant dividing, pushing things away, desperately wanting to be one way and not another causes more suffering, not less. To push away even one thing is to push away all things.
How can we loosen our grip and take on a more holistic view, one that no longer separates life and death, this and that, right and wrong into competing camps?
This division has us walking around like zombies. We think we’re awake, but really we’re just craving what is not currently this. This moment becomes a holding ground for the next best thing. We’re always just waiting - waiting to arrive, waiting to become, waiting to be better.
But we are only what we are right now. No more, no less.
Radical Wholeness means honoring all these manifestations of us. You can feel this radical acceptance almost immediately, all the energy we use to maintain our separation suddenly becomes available to a more creative and flourishing life.
This is about being honest. About a life free of division. Face what you are, be honest - Who are you, and why are you this way? Can you accept that you are a coin - a single, whole coin. You can’t be just one side of a coin.
To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln: a mind divided against itself cannot stand.
To paraphrase Carl Jung: I would rather be whole than good.
Take a moment and inquire: Are there parts of yourself that you hate?
Can you stop hating them? Can you love them, or at least stop burying them? Can you be with them, because you are them?
We have to pull all the parts of ourselves together to face this life. There’s enough division and conflict in the world, why add to it within yourself? It’s exhausting.
This is why walking up to the cliff, and imagining going over without action is so very healthy. There is no life without death. No death without life. This is what it is to be whole.
I think of the great Thich Nhat Hanh poem, Call Me by My True Names:
“I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate.
And I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.”
With similar birth conditions and life circumstances, you could just as easily be the thief or the heroin, Trump or Putin, the person with AIDS or the unhoused neighbor.
If you were provoked in the right situation, at the right time, there is no activity or emotion beyond your potential.
Every side of the coin is worthy of caring, even if they are deserving of punishment. That’s love.
Everything else is just picking and choosing what is worthy of our care.
Wholeness isn’t tidy. It’s wild and contradictory. It’s the grace of being both storm and shelter, of seeing yourself in every face, even the ones you fear.
When we stop amputating our complexity, we remember what love actually is: not approval, not agreement, but inclusion. The world is divided enough. The real revolution might just be becoming undivided inside yourself.
We have it all. Why not be it all?
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Also - now’s a perfect time to buy a copy of Brown Enough in Paperback (one for you, one for the homie, one for the neighborhood library) and listen to Season 3 of the podcast!