It’s everywhere. Yin and yang. Light and darkness. Sukha and Sthira. Ease and effort. Positive and negative. Sun and moon. Ha and Tha. And, of course, Newton: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Is our world defined by polarities?

This is something I’m pondering. Because I’m thinking of the struggle against the yang, the darkness, the effort, and the reaction. I’m someone who can be nearly eviscerated by the story on the front page of a newspaper. (One day I’m going to start up a news source full of the good things happening in our world.) A violent act in a completely fictional TV show will stay imprinted in my mind forever. If I love someone, friend, lover, Guru, family—it doesn’t matter—I can take a simple forgotten phone call to heart. My mom used to call me her soft-hearted kid. Lucky for me, and my vitality network, I understand this about myself. So don’t worry if you forget to call me when you say you will; I won’t make a big scene.

I know lots of people out there who are like me. And lately, we’ve been talking about the challenge of keeping up, when we are so acutely aware of all the actions in the world that might keep us down.

In his book, Yoga of Heart, yogi Mark Whitwell said something like this: Suffering is caused by our resistance to reality.

In other words: Stop struggling, Stop suffering.

I feel there’s a solution here for me, along the lines of my practice of radical acceptance in love. What if we accept it all? No terms, no conditions, no exceptions. It doesn’t mean we ignore the horrible, and sometimes horrific, acts. It doesn’t mean we won’t work to make the world a better place. It just means we’ll do it from a place of inner grace and strength, a place that understands the world is full of darkness and light.

I’m hearing the lyrics of Trevor Hall, “Only in the darkness can we see the stars ablaze.”