The Front That Always Has a Back

Alan Watts has a line about waves that I resisted for a long time.

The idea is that a crest and a trough are not two things. They are one shape. You cannot order a wave that is all crest. The high part exists because the low parts are on either side of it, and if you flattened the low parts you would not get an improved wave, you would get no wave.

He extends it to everything. Front and back. Figure and ground. You cannot have one without the other, and the belief that you could is where a lot of our suffering about our suffering comes from.

I resisted it because it sounded, at first pass, like every consoling thing anyone has ever said to a person in the worst week of their life. Everything happens for a reason. God has a plan. This will make you stronger. I have been on the receiving end of that genre and I have watched other people receive it, and it is almost always more comfortable for the speaker than the listener.

So I want to separate two things that get collapsed, because I think the collapse is what makes the idea unbearable.

One is the claim that the bad thing was worth it. That the loss was, in some ledger, a fair price for what came after. I do not believe this and I am not going to write it. I have spent the last year sitting with people who lost children, lost years, lost bodies they will not get back, and not one of them made that trade willingly, and none of them would make it again.

The other is much smaller. It is that the shape of a life includes both, and that pretending otherwise costs you something.

That second one I have come to believe.

There was a Christmas party at my company a few years ago. A man who worked with us had been very sick and had received a new heart, and he had gotten home, and the room was praying for a miracle for him.

He died not long after. He had about two weeks at home.

I have thought about that room a great deal since, and about the word miracle, and about how everyone in it was aimed at a future event that never came while standing inside the thing they were asking for. He had a new heart. He got two weeks in his own house with his own people. That was the miracle, and it was being spent while we asked for a different one.

I am not saying the two weeks were enough. They were not remotely enough and his family would tell you so. I am saying that our attention was pointed entirely at the crest we wanted and entirely away from the one we had, and that this is a very human error and I make it constantly.

Watts would say the mistake is structural. Narrow attention picks out the figure and loses the ground, and so we experience a life as a series of separate events, some good and some bad, which we then try to sort. But the sorting is the illusion. The good parts and the hard parts came into being together, out of the same material, in the same shape.

I can see this most clearly in other people's lives, which is convenient and probably a little cowardly of me.

A woman I spent time with was widowed at eighteen with no insurance and no plan. What she had was a skill her grandmother had paid for on the condition she never use it. She used it. Sixty years later there is a line item in the fund she runs that pays for exactly that credential for other people, and as far as I can tell she has never once said out loud that the two things are connected.

That is not a redemption story. Her husband is still dead. She was still eighteen and alone in a town of a hundred and twenty people. Nothing about the later part fixes the earlier part.

But the later part is made out of the earlier part. The trough and the crest are one shape, and the shape is her.

What I take from this, for myself, is not that I should be grateful for the hard stretches of my own life. I am not, particularly. It is something more like: stop trying to file them under a verdict.

The pressure I feel, and I suspect it is not only me, is to have processed things. To be able to say what it meant, what it taught me, where it fits. And I notice that the demand for a verdict is itself a spotlight problem. It wants the hard thing to be a separate object, sitting apart from the rest of my life, labeled and shelved.

It is not a separate object. It is on the same continuous surface as everything I have done since, including this book, and I could not remove it without removing all of it.

So the question I am sitting with, and I do not have the answer, is whether it is possible to carry your history without either of the two available moves. Without pretending it was secretly a gift. And without letting it be the fixed point that everything after is measured against.

I think the answer might just be time and a lot of driving.

Resonance: The Quiet Revolution of Compassion is out November 10, 2026 from Akiiki Press.