Adam Blatner

I realized after reading that previous post that supported the spirit of intellectual rigor and critical thinking that readers might perceive my wife and me as being serious thinkers. We are, indeed, and that is part of our spirituality as well as our lives. We talk about all manner of things with great seriousness—but that’s only about 12.4% of the time; we also talk about things with a mixture of seriousness and playfulness about 32.6% of the time, and much of the time we just fool around, joking, singing together, reminiscing, appreciating the beauty of nature, wondering about or reporting news about the people we love, and leading a delightfully diversified life.

To me, part of the art of living is balancing seriousness and play, thoughtful rationality and silliness, integrating and synthesizing various components, and also hanging out a bit in the fuzzy areas in-between.

There’s even room for suffering, creative dissatisfaction, using negative emotions of grief, depression, anxiety, guilt, etc. as opportunities to learn, integrate, resolve, change, be reminded, be challenged, and the like. While we don’t value getting “stuck” in negativity, neither do we fear it so much that we have to avoid it when there’s something we might learn by grappling with these experiences.