On the practice of holding opposites until a third way appears, and why that's how destiny gets made.
That's me at the wheel. Hands on the clay, watching what it wants to become. I think that pottery is a great metaphor for life.
The potter uses both hands, usually one outside the form and one inside, the clay spinning between them. The vessel only rises when both hands push back equally. Push too hard from the outside and the wall splits. Pull away from the inside and the whole thing falls in. The pot only stands up because you stay in the discomfort of those two pressures and listen to what the clay can take next.
I believe, that's also how a life takes shape.
We grow up carrying opposites like fear and courage, security and wildness, or the pull of family and the pull of becoming. The part of us that wants to belong and the part that knows belonging may cost us something. And we're mostly taught to deal with the tension by getting rid of it fast. Pick a side, choose, get over it. The ego is a pressure-release valve, and we get rewarded for being quick about it.
But the cost of rushing to a fix is the same at the wheel as it is in your life, the wall splits. The shape you could have
grown into falls in before it has a chance to rise.
At the potter's wheel, holding the discomfort is craftsmanship. It's the practice of waiting, of letting the material tell you what to do next. Anxiety stops being something to get rid of as it becomes information about the clay. It's the material saying not yet, and the potter who listens can make something wonderful.
I think that's what the mystic traditions have always known, they teach us how to dance with opposites. The desert teachers I come from didn't run from heat or cold, they let the body sit in both until it learned what it was made of.
And the beauty is that when you manage to hold the tension long enough, something arrives. A third way that comes up from somewhere deeper than your thinking mind. It almost never shows up as a thought, it comes as an image, a gesture, a song's lyrics that won't leave you, a dream, the sudden tilt of how a room feels. Your head can't make it appear but you will recognize it once it does.
This is why symbols matter. The deeper mind doesn't speak in sentences. It speaks in images, gestures, dreams or the lyrics of a song. Take oracles, rituals, the old motifs people have kept across cultures for thousands of years, these were translators, ways of making the unsayable hearable, the invisible visible. The third way always comes through them. And learning to listen, in the end, this how you craft a life you are proud of. If you've followed me you now know that Maktoub means destiny and studio means experimentation. Together they hold what I believe about how a life takes shape: destiny isn't a script you're handed at birth, it's what rises when you stay long enough with the pulls of being alive, fear and courage, your roots and your becoming, the paths opening and the paths closing.
What you're crafting, in the end, isn't a life so much as the muscle that lets a life be made. The patience to stay a little longer in the tension next time, the attention to recognize the image when it finally surfaces, the trust that something is moving in you even when nothing on the surface looks like it is.
And the strange thing about muscles is that they grow without your noticing. Every time you use this one, the life you're living in reshapes itself a little because you let it teach you, slowly, what it wanted to become.
So hold the tension of opposites, a third way will always rise.
