Given the task to electrify your life with what matters most, how do you ensure that each wire is attached to its proper switch and that each remains un-frayed?

Illusions (and delusions) about life have often sidelined me from this task. These illusions include misconceptions about how much change one person can make in the world and how quickly, how easy it will be to find and maintain meaningful relationships and satisfying work, and a host of issues pulled along by these.

Each of these delusions threatens a rewiring of thought: "I care about important, good, and valuable things. But now I find that caring hurts. If I didn’t care, could I avoid this hurt?” This little monologue often isn’t given consciously, but its effect is unmistakable. It begins to wear a clear path through the mental circuits.

It presses toward two potential solutions. First, we may simply decide to kill the breakers. When confronted with how much it hurts to care in "real life," it's easy to decide to stop sending power through the wires altogether. After all, if the light isn’t illuminating what we want, why pay the power bill?

If we don't choose this route, we might assume the alternative is to live with the lights always on, to keep the power constantly flowing. We're incredulous at the prospect of having to give up our visions of love or wealth or work or—fill in the blank. It is, however—as my father frequently reminded me as a kid—expensive to leave the lights on.

If we follow this second path, we martyr ourselves. We find that living with all the lights on means living with hurt. We wound ourselves because we can't possibly imagine a world in which we don't care about or don't finally get x.

Lights on or lights off. We banish what we care about or allow it to crush us. Either path leads to its own misery.

T.S. Eliot searched for a solution to this problem too. Here's how he prays an answer in “Ash Wednesday,” a poem written shortly after his conversion: "Teach us to care and not to care / teach us to sit still.”

These lines sum up the struggle of the whole poem. Throughout the poem, Eliot maps for himself the boundary of his new life of faith. He paints the gray areas in which he now lives, the “time of tension between dying and birth.” What makes up this tension? Eliot sings of multiplied paradoxes and competing desires we find as fixtures of daily life. These paradoxes establish a kind of exile between illumination and darkness.

Whether it’s navigating the pitfalls of envy and desire or realizing that he can “rejoice” only because he has “construct[ed] something / Upon which to rejoice,” Eliot doesn’t avoid the tensions of life. He determines to live well between the polarities.

In other words, Eliot denies the rules of a zero-sum game. Living in the open spaces which poetry creates, he replaces a simple on-off switch with a powerful set of dimmer switches. Each new line of poetry, each simple and paradoxical prayer, becomes a careful adjustment of his view of reality illuminated by his faith.

This way—the way of embracing paradox and tension—is harder than the binary alternatives. The way of embracing what it means to navigate semi-darkness, to understand when bright is too bright, requires attention and self-awareness. It requires waiting and hoping and learning to manage the hurts and desires that come with real life. There are no shortcuts on this road. It demands wisdom.

It requires constant prayer:

Teach me to care.

Teach me not to care.

Teach me to sit still.

As I meet 30, I don’t pretend to be a master electrician. In fact, I’m often a bit frantic, flipping switches and scrounging funds to pay the power bill. I’m looking for a few missing bulbs I hope to eventually find and praying I don't electrocute myself.

I often find myself with Eliot, sitting with him in the pew like a kid in his Sunday best, trying hard not to fidget over the things that hardly matter at all, trying to pay attention to the things that do.

—Christian Shockley