Over the past week, a passage by Tolstoy has been reappearing in my head like a stubborn wrinkle on a crisp white bed sheet.

The silent monologue occurs in the mind of a confident man of impeccable status. But he is faced with real life as it is, which is not as he wants it to be. He suspects that his wife is cheating on him and is helpless to respond, torn between his self-created mental guardrails and true emotions.

“He was not a jealous man. Jealousy, in his opinion, was insulting to a wife, and a man ought to have trust in his wife. Why he ought to have trust – that is, complete assurance that his young wife would always love him – he never asked himself; but he felt no distrust, because he had trust and told himself that he had to have it.
But now, though his conviction that jealousy was a shameful feeling and that one ought to have trust was not destroyed, he felt that he stood face to face with something illogical and senseless, and he did not know what to do. He stood face to face with life, confronting the possibility of his wife loving someone else besides him, and it was this that seemed so senseless and incomprehensible to him, because it was life itself.
All his life he had lived and worked in spheres of service that dealt with reflections of life. And each time he had encountered life itself, he had drawn back from it. Now he experienced a feeling similar to what a man would feel who was calmly walking across a bridge over an abyss and suddenly saw that the bridge had been taken down and below him was the bottomless deep. This bottomless deep was life itself, the bridge the artificial life that he had lived.”

He could not engineer life’s true colors any more than he could command an ocean to part. This reality scares him, and the immediate response is to retreat behind the mental barriers erected to protect him from everyone else’s reality.

The author Cheryl Strayed says it best—“We are complicated people; our lives do not play out in absolutes.” Yet there is sometimes this awful, nagging fear chasing various goals in the name of excitement, passion, or achievement is slowly converting me from a human being into a human doing.

In the mind of a human doer, these absolutes—such as that trust is immutable because I will it so, that jealousy is shameful and thus forever banish-able, that deviating from the plan is harmful and thus impossible—replace the essence of actually living. The artificial life that is the bridge spanning the abyss of life itself that Tolstoy writes about becomes life. The beautiful shades of grey are drowned out by the black and white of these inflexible rules.

In rereading newsletter No. 37: Be or Do? from a month and a half ago, I wonder how far I should let myself go. I wonder whether a burgeoning desire to find an independent north star is silencing the voices of nuance that come up from “the bottomless deep of life itself.” I am concerned of becoming overly binary and judgmental, as if everything in life can be categorized as a “1”—worthwhile, or a “0”—not worthwhile. In No. 37, I cited Seneca’s concept of euthymia, or “the belief that you’re on the right path and not led astray by the many tracks which cross yours of people who are hopelessly lost,” using this to argue that life’s dreams should be chased by accomplishing tasks, not by ruminating about them. In layman’s terms, put your head down and start digging. There’s nothing wrong with that sentiment, provided that you stop shoveling and look around every once in awhile. But I rarely stop to look around; I fear that I have already started to sacrifice the emotional at the altar of rationality.

Back to Tolstoy: Is there now a fear of looking down the abyss of a complicated life? Am I wrongly stuck on the comfortable bridge of an artificial life that I’ve constructed?

This year has seen my actions gone largely unchallenged—none of the habits, decision-making processes, or routines have hinted at being flawed or dangerous. As I wrote in No. 31, winnowing your priorities and habits tends to create a stable life within the guardrails. There is a Catch-22, however. When executed perfectly, habits and routine spawn a productive and superficially healthy individual that contributes to society and is thus left to live without criticism. Suffice to say, that is about the situation I find myself in: healthy, stable, and comfortable. Also: mechanized, predictable, and stunted.

So I continue to stand on this bridge that spans the bottomless pit of real life and all of its grey ambiguities and refuse to peer into the abyss. I tell myself that there is only wrong down there and no right, when it is really that I am afraid. But to not look down is to deny that being human means to constantly allow ourselves to be seen in a new and fractured light.

In this way, the walls built with bricks of habits and routines and glued together with arguments of “being and logical rational” rise higher and higher. Compassion comes to be defined as offering solutions instead of simply “giving all the love that I’ve got.”

Inwardly, we all know the answer. “Life isn’t some narcissistic game you play online.” I know by her eyes that my mom is afraid that I will forget her timeless advice: Human relationships are the most important thing in life. In living this real life and staring into the abyss, we become, as Strayed puts it, “happy, humane, and occasionally all f**ked up.”

It is equally hard for a perfectionist to remain satisfied with imperfection as it is to attain perfection. In the process of trying to asymptote towards flawlessness, flaws are suppressed, with wounds stitched with the bullet still lodged inside.

But to “inhabit the beauty that lives in your beastly body and strive to see the beauty in all the other beasts” means to cut open the sutures and unearth the ugly that in inseparable from the beautiful. It requires “walking without a stick into the darkest woods.”