Opposites often merge in ways that are contrary to expectation. Seeing this, it might be well to enjoy life’s party with its occasional stomach ache.

Roshi John Tarrant tells of an evening when his friend’s girlfriend was having a birthday party for her daughter. Balloons trailing pink ribbons, half-eaten cones and gobs of ice cream going soft in the heat of the kitchen, sticky messes of chocolate cake, and lots of chattering, gooey little girl’s faces. When parents had hauled the others off, the daughter came to her mother complaining of a stomach ache. “Honey, you ate too much cake and ice cream,” her mother told her. But the boyfriend, flaked out on the sofa and having never raised a child of his own, told her, “Maybe you didn’t eat enough.”

I doubt the gastronomic accuracy of the boyfriend’s diagnosis but I like the way it turns things upside down. “Maybe you didn’t eat enough” is so contrary that it teases the mind out of its conventional expectations. Life itself is a party with a stomach ache, requiring a tolerance for contradiction that frees us from whatever argument we’re having with circumstance. If we find ourselves in one of life’s distressing circumstances, we can lobby the universe for relief but from the universe’s viewpoint the distress we’re being handed may be exactly what’s needed to see the situation through to its intrinsic conclusion.

One of life’s contradictions is that the best intention is invariably wrong. When I took the time to notice, it wasn’t hard to see that anything we humans think or do is bound to be mistaken one way or another. “Ten thousand beautiful mistakes,” the Chinese Zen masters were fond of saying. An old Christian story attributed to the Desert Fathers touches on the beauty and innocence of this human fallibility. The story goes that a monk asked Abba Sisoius, “What am I to do since I have fallen?” The Abba replied, “Get up.” “I did get up, but I fell again,” the monk told him. “Get up again,” said the Abba.  “I did, but I must admit that I fell once again. So what should I do?” “Never fall down without getting up,” the Abba concluded.

Falling down is inevitable; it’s what we humans do. When I acknowledge this it brings me to an unguarded kindness and sympathy. Falling makes us human and, if there is such a thing, it makes us wise. Abba Sisoius is showing the monk that the trick of falling is in the getting up. It is the getting up that alone redeems a fall. Some truly perilous falls may occur in a lifetime, but they are the very ones that reveal the obvious truth that we can only get up in the place where we fell down. And even more pointedly, our falling teaches us that it is in the very act of falling that we learn the way back up. “The coin lost in the river is found in the river,” old Master Yun Men told us ages ago.