Guest Series: Two Things Can Be True
Guest essays exploring the paradoxes that shape our lives.
I spent much of my life trying to resolve paradoxes. I wanted grief to end, shame to disappear, relationships to make sense, and family wounds to heal. Instead, age has taught me that many of life’s deepest truths arrive as contradictions we cannot solve.
I write about loving people who wounded us and grieving people we never fully knew. About growing older while still discovering who we are. About shame that isolates us and honesty that sets us free. About loss that breaks our hearts and love that somehow survives.
The stories on What Keeps Me Awake are usually my own, but paradoxes belong to all of us. Occasionally, another writer explores those same tensions from a different vantage point. Their story is not mine, yet I recognize myself in it.
Today’s guest essay by Dr. Landon Eggleston is one of those stories, and I am honored to share it with you.
— Loren A. Olson, MD
Guest Essay
Two Things Can Be True
Tomorrow deserves consideration.
Today deserves inhabiting.
For much of my life, I treated these ideas as if they were in conflict with one another.
The more responsible I became, the more I believed I should be focused on what came next. Planning felt productive. Preparation felt wise. Looking ahead felt like the mark of someone who had their life together.
Presence, on the other hand, felt like something I would get around to later, after I had accomplished enough, achieved enough, or secured enough certainty about the future.
I have always been a planner. Part of that is simply my personality. Part of it comes from my profession. As an emergency physician, I spend my days anticipating possibilities, assessing risks, and preparing for outcomes that may never occur.
Thinking ahead is not only useful—it is necessary.
But if I’m honest, my relationship with planning has never been entirely professional.
Like many people who have experienced hardship, uncertainty, or trauma, I learned early on that preparation can feel like protection. If I thought far enough ahead, anticipated enough variables, and developed enough contingency plans, perhaps I could avoid being caught off guard. Perhaps I could create some measure of certainty in an uncertain world.
Well, the problem is that life has never agreed to those terms.
No amount of planning guarantees clarity. No roadmap eliminates uncertainty. No carefully constructed vision of the future can prevent life from surprising us.
Sometimes we play with Barbie dolls when we are little and think about getting married and having a baby by twenty-two. Only to reach twenty-two and think, well, that certainly was a silly thought. Either we grow up, learn more, and change the plan, or we don’t have a plan for every twist and turn handed to us.
Eventually, every one of us reaches the edge of what we can predict and must take a step forward anyway.
The older I get, the more I realize that many of the most meaningful parts of my life emerged from circumstances I never could have planned: The people who changed me. The opportunities that redirected me. The lessons that shaped me. Even some of the experiences I spent years wishing had never happened.
At the time, many of those moments felt like mistakes.
Now they feel like necessary chapters.
There are certainly decisions I would not make again. Relationships I stayed in too long. Situations I would navigate differently with the wisdom I have now. Earlier versions of myself sometimes make me cringe when I look back.
But I have stopped wishing those versions away because every one of them brought me here.
Every imperfect decision, every heartbreak, every detour, and every season of uncertainty contributed something to the person I eventually became.
And if I’m being honest, I had to survive some bad relationships before I could recognize a good one when it arrived.
Or, as Ariana Grande so eloquently put it:
“Thank you. Next.”
Humor aside, there is a profound truth hidden in that sentiment.
Every ending taught me something.
Every disappointment revealed something about myself. Every relationship, whether it lasted or not, helped clarify what I valued and what I was willing to accept. Had everything unfolded according to my carefully constructed plans, I would likely be living a very different life from the one I have today.
And I am not convinced it would be better.
That realization has changed the way I think about the future.
For years, I believed the goal was certainty. Now I think the goal is trust.
Not trust that everything will work out exactly as I hope. Life has repeatedly demonstrated that it won’t. Rather, trust in my ability to navigate whatever comes next. Trust that uncertainty does not automatically mean danger. Trust that I can handle outcomes I cannot yet imagine.
Working in emergency medicine has reinforced this lesson more than any book, podcast, or self-help framework ever could. Every shift reminds me that life is simultaneously more fragile and more resilient than we realize.
Tomorrow is never guaranteed, and yet people continue to endure extraordinary hardship, adapt to circumstances they never imagined, and rebuild lives that once seemed irreparably broken.
If there is one thing my patients have taught me over the years, it is that human beings are remarkably capable of navigating uncertainty, even when they do not believe they are.
The lesson I carry home from those experiences is not that planning is futile. Quite the opposite. Planning matters. Goals matter. Preparation matters. The future deserves our consideration. What I have come to question, however, is the assumption that preparation alone is enough.
Because there is a subtle difference between preparing for your life and postponing it.
I think many of us spend years doing the latter without even realizing it. I certainly did. We convince ourselves that we will finally relax after the next promotion, enjoy ourselves once things settle down, or allow ourselves to be happy when we reach some future milestone.
We tell ourselves that life will begin after we find the right partner, move to the right city, make enough money, buy the house, get married, have children, or accomplish whatever goal currently occupies our horizon.
(To my fellow medicine folks, don’t you dare wait until you are done with your training to live your life).
But life has a habit of moving the finish line.
There is always another objective to pursue, another problem to solve, another future version of ourselves waiting somewhere in the distance.
Meanwhile, the life we claim to be building continues unfolding quietly in front of us. It unfolds in morning coffee shared with someone we love, in conversations that subtly change our perspective, in walks we almost didn’t take, and in ordinary Tuesdays that seem entirely forgettable until years later when we realize they belonged to a season we would gladly revisit if given the chance.
A number of years back, I converted all my parents’ old VHS tapes of us as children into a flash drive. In watching back years and years of films, I realized that I didn’t care to watch the recitals, choir concerts, or graduation ceremonies. I found myself watching the mundane moments. Us eating breakfast together, playing in the yard, sliding down snow banks on boogie boards.
The truth is that we rarely recognize the most important moments while we are living them.
We identify them in hindsight. Looking back, we suddenly see that what felt ordinary at the time was quietly shaping the trajectory of our lives. The relationship that taught us what we needed. The failure that redirected us. The difficult season that developed a resilience we would later depend upon. The choice we agonized over ultimately led us somewhere we never expected to go.
Perhaps that is why I no longer believe the challenge is choosing between the future and the present. The challenge is learning how to honor both.
It is learning how to plan without becoming consumed by planning, how to dream without becoming trapped in anticipation, and how to work toward tomorrow without sacrificing today.
Two things can be true.
The future deserves consideration.
The present deserves participation.
One does not diminish the other. In fact, I would argue they depend on each other.
The future is shaped by how we live today, and today’s experiences often make sense only when viewed from the future.
Both are necessary.
Both matter.
Because one day, the future we spend so much time preparing for arrives. When it does, it arrives quietly. It arrives disguised as an ordinary day. It arrives as today.
The question is whether we will be present enough to notice.
Author’s Bio
Dr. Landon Eggleston is a popular author who writes on Substack under the name Clear View. She covers topics about staying present, building resilience, and aligning one’s life with purpose.
An Emergency Room physician in Chicago, she describes herself as “very analytical in nature” while acknowledging a paradox of her own: “I actually make most decisions on intuition.” She is a detail-oriented and original thinker with a gift for noticing what others often miss.
As she puts it:
“I am on a persistently endless journey to live the most meaningful life I can without letting one second of this one wild and precious life pass by.”
Dr. Eggleston’s writing continually challenges and inspires me. Her work explores many of the paradoxes adjacent to my own, and I am grateful that she agreed to contribute to this series.
Check out Dr. Eggleston’s essays and like, comment, or subscribe.
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An absolute honor to be able to contribute to your page. Thank you for the opportunity!
This makes SO much sense and is refreshing to read. We are harangued by the wellness industry/community/whatever to remain in the present despite the impossibility of negotiating modern life. As though we can live without, as the author says, consideration for the future. I would add, honoring and having compassion for the past without letting it stain the present. All three are possible and necessary.