Sometimes we labour under the mistaken belief that happiness can only come if there are absolutely no difficulties or when everything is resolved in our life or our life history. However, we sometimes need to recognize and simply accept the different parts of our lives and the different directions we want to take, and allow that perfect integration is unlikely to be ever achieved fully in this life. We can hold these different parts and accept the different feelings that exist within us,  as we are, without demanding that they all harmonize. As the writer Mark Epstein put it so well in his excellent book,  we can be “in pieces, without falling apart”

Contradictions have always existed in the soul of man. But it is only when we prefer analysing to silence that they become a constant and insoluble problem. We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them  and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which makes them trivial by comparison.

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude