Tonight is our last night with our foster dog before he gets adopted. Having him has been a time filled with playing, training, many visits to the vet, some sleepless nights, and lots and lots of snuggles. (I can’t stress the snuggling enough, this dog is a LOVE.)

As my son was talking to me this morning about how our foster dog wouldn’t be with us anymore, he had many different emotions come up. “I wish he could stay with us forever. I’m sad he’s going away. I’m excited to foster other animals. Will we never see him again? I’m going to miss him so much. I’m happy you found him a good family.” In less than five minutes, he expressed sadness, longing, happiness, excitement, and disappointment. All over the same event.

This got me thinking about how humans and our emotions are quite complex, and how we can have a range of emotions even over the same experience. I also started thinking about how much our society tries to force us out of this natural process and into dichotomous thinking with messages like: A person is good or bad. You are seen as happy or sad. You win or you lose. Do you love or do you hate your job? You are labeled as shy or outgoing. It seems there is often little recognition in our world for the grey area, the middle between two extremes, and even less often does it seem like we are taught that we can hold two differing emotions at once.

Opposite feelings can and do exist at the same time. For instance, when you become a parent, you are over the moon in love with your child AND you can feel sad and disappointed over no longer having your life be your own. You lose a loved one who was ill — you are sad they are no longer living AND you feel glad they are no longer suffering. AND you may feel anger, confusion, regret, etc. (Grief can bring up all the feelings at once.) Even in our universal experience of coping with Coronavirus right now, you may feel joy in the extra time with loved ones and the decreased busyness of day to day life AND feel depressed over not seeing friends or having your normal routine. When you think about it closely, people are rarely holding just one emotion. Also, it can feel quite confining to believe you have to or are “supposed to” feel only one thing over a given situation. I recently finished the book, “On Being Human” by Jennifer Pastiloff, which was an amazingly open-hearted and authentic memoir, and she articulates this idea beautifully throughout the book — the notion that we can be and feel two (or more) things at once.

Making space for multiple feelings, and incorporating “and” into your vocabulary, creates spaciousness in your experience. It gives you permission to be the multitude of things you are as a person: Scared AND brave. Energized AND exhausted. Grateful AND disappointed. Distracted AND here.