Below I name five tasks that are very hard and very fun to do. They are less like problems to be solved than like instruments to be played. We don’t “finish” or “master” the cello; we practice it for a lifetime and call the practicing music.

I offer these tasks to you in a spirit of cheerful impossibility. Each one asks for more than any of us can reliably deliver, which is exactly why they stay interesting. The goal isn’t to become experts at these arts, which will never happen, but to become smarter and wilder and kinder as we work on them.

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IMPOSSIBLE BUT FUN TASK #1. To thrive in the midst of raging contradictions

Our challenge is to not merely tolerate contradiction. Instead we cheerfully apply the truth that contradiction is often a nutrient.

The spiritual traditions we draw from know this well: Taoist sages don’t resolve the tension between yin and yang, but inhabit it.

Kabbalists say the chaotic material world is as real and valid and necessary as Ein Sof, the utterly pristine and unknowable aspect of the Divine.

The trickster, my own favorite archetype, is constitutionally drawn to paradox and contradiction, loves to play in the the overlap between realms. Why? Because that’s where the sacred action is.

What makes a contradiction “rage” is our expectation that it should resolve. Our task is to reframe the rumination so that we fully abide in an uncanny knowing: Contradictions aren’t necessarily problems that demand solutions, but usually the actual texture of reality at sufficient depth.

Life insists on being both precious and brutal. Beauty keeps appearing inside ugliness. Sublime redemption hides in the shameful.

Our job isn’t to file these opposites into separate drawers but to develop the suppleness that lets us be at home in the roar of irreconcilability.

Thriving means we can think clearly, love fully, and act decisively even when the ground is paradox all the way down.

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IMPOSSIBLE BUT FUN TASK #2. To interrupt and overthrow compulsively negative trains of thought in the middle of their flow through our brains

This is hard. Negative thought patterns have momentum. They gather speed.

By the time we recognize we’re in one, it may have already commandeered significant neural territory and is busy recruiting allies: memories that confirm its narrative, sensations that validate its urgency, and future scenarios that prove its gloomy predictions.

To interrupt the flow mid-stream requires an internal heroism that no one gives us credit for, because the battle is invisible. We have to locate and pull the emergency brake while the train is moving.

We have to remember that we aren’t the train. The thought isn’t a fact. The feeling isn’t a forecast. The story the mind tells with such compelling authority is a ramshackle story, not a verdict.

This is some of the most demanding spiritual athleticism available to humans. And it must often be performed while exhausted, in public, with no applause.

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A Pre-Emptive Word to the Skeptic: People who don’t know my work well may read the passage above and cry “toxic positivity.” If you’re one of them, here’s my reply: Toxic positivity is the command to not feel what you feel. It involves smothering grief under affirmations, pasting a smiley face over the wound, and bypassing the hard thing by pretending it isn’t there.

What I’m describing in Impossible But Fun Task #2 is the opposite. I’m not asking you to deny the darkness, but to wrangle it while fully awake.

The negative train is real. Its cargo is real. Nowhere do I say the feeling is fake. I say the feeling isn’t a forecast, and the story isn’t a verdict.

You can honor a sorrow without being conscripted by it. You can take a thought seriously without taking it as the truth.

Toxic positivity skips the struggle. I’m pointing straight into the struggle, and calling it heroic, demanding, and often performed while exhausted, in public, with no applause.

IMPOSSIBLE BUT FUN TASK #3. To negotiate partial solutions to complex problems; to do the partially right thing when it’s impossible to do the totally right thing

Perfectionism isn’t the noble virtue it pretends to be. Too often it functions as paralysis dressed in high-mindedness. It’s a refusal to act until conditions that will never arrive will supposedly finally arrive.

Real life rarely offers the pure, clean, uncompromised option. It offers the messy middle and the imperfect compromise. If we’re honest and compassionate, the 60% solution might actually help someone—if we’re willing to stop mourning the 100% solution that exists only in our imagination.

To negotiate a partial solution requires the intellectual humility to admit that the half a loaf on the table is far better than having no loaf at all.

We’ve got to prize moral flexibility by accepting that doing some good is better than doing a perfect nothing.

And we must have tolerance for the discomfort of knowing we fell short of the ideal.

Those who gain skill at this exercise become genuinely useful in the world. Those who don’t often become experts at explaining why nothing can be done.

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IMPOSSIBLE BUT FUN TASK #4. To be discerning as we protect ourselves from people’s flaws while at the same time being generous as we celebrate their beauty.

This one is exquisitely difficult because the two moves, protection and celebration, may seem to be each other’s enemy.

Our discernment can congeal into coldness; our generosity can slide into enabling. The task is to keep both valves fully open at once, which requires a bifocal vision most of us were never taught.

What it demands is seeing people in layers. Their wounds or limitations, which can genuinely harm us, occupy one layer. The irreducible beauty of their soul occupies another layer. And neither cancels the other.

Protection without celebration produces a defended, armored life. We become safe but small. Celebration without discernment produces naivety and eventually resentment.

The mature form of this practice lets us avoid exposing ourselves to someone’s destructive patterns in the same breath as we honor their beauty.

This is fierce love rather than sentimental love. It sees clearly and cherishes anyway.

IMPOSSIBLE BUT FUN TASK #5. To graduate from a batch of weird karma that has persisted.

Is it even feasible to graduate from a batch of weird karma that has persisted despite our efforts to outrun and outgrow it? I say yes: But we must:

1. accept the situation as it is;

2. acknowledge our role in precipitating and prolonging it;

3. feel gratitude for what it has taught us.

These are three distinct and sequential gates, and most of us get stuck at the first one.

Acceptance isn’t the same as defeated resignation. It’s the refusal to keep paying the psychic tax of wishing reality were otherwise.

The second gate is harder still: acknowledging not just that we are in a dicey mess, but that we helped create the dicey mess. We didn’t build it alone and we may have done it without our full conscious knowledge. Our unconscious patterns may have played the largest role.

This gate tends to provoke intense resistance, because the ego experiences accountability as an attack. But without passing through it, we remain victims of circumstance rather than participants in our own story.

The third gate, gratitude, seems at first like cruelty, but is in fact liberation. Not gratitude as performance or toxic positivity, but the real thing: the recognition that this peculiar affliction delivered lessons available nowhere else.

It honed capacities that simple ease would never have forged. It revealed dimensions of ourselves that fair weather never would have exposed.

If we pass through all three gates, there’s a good chance that we will graduate from the messy karma. Ignore even one gate, and it willn arrange for our enrollment in the next semester.

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None of these five IMPOSSIBLE BUT FUN TASKS will ever be checked off completely. We will practice them badly, then slightly less badly, then badly again in some fresh way we hadn’t yet imagined. Eventually, we may develop some decent but eminently fallible skill.

That’s the fun of it. The impossibility is what keeps the door open, forever, to becoming more interesting than we currently are.