Life Is Complicated (And That’s the Point)

I had a conversation with a friend today. One of those real, sit-in-the-heart kind of conversations—the ones that come not to fix things, but to name what’s real.

She was sharing about someone close to her—someone she loves deeply—who holds a very different view of the world. Someone who always seems to want a clean answer. A single explanation. One thing to blame.

“It’s the immigrants.”

“It’s the government.”

“It’s the elites.”

“It’s the politicians.”

The story changes depending on the day. But the structure of the story stays the same.

There’s always one cause. One culprit. One fix.

And sitting with her, I felt the ache under her words—the grief of living in a world that feels more fractured by the day, and the exhaustion of trying to keep a bridge intact when it feels like the ground beneath it keeps shifting.

And I felt something else too.

Something I’ve been turning over in myself lately.

A deep remembering:

Life is complicated.

Painfully. Beautifully. Inherently complicated.

And maybe—just maybe—that’s not something to run from.

Maybe that’s what saves us.

We live in a world desperate for simple answers.

And can we blame anyone for that?

We’re tired.

We’re overwhelmed.

We’re overstimulated.

Most of us are walking through our days with more questions than clarity.

It’s a seductive thing to believe that if we could just solve this one issue, everything would get better.

If people stopped immigrating.

If our preferred party won.

If we banned the right things or cancelled the right people.

If we could just remove them, whoever “them” is today.

But underneath those arguments is something deeper.

A longing for certainty.

A craving for control.

A fear that if we admit just how tangled the world really is—we’ll drown in it.

But love… the world is tangled.

And we’re already in it.

We weren’t dropped into a vacuum.

We were born into a living web.

A web of ancestors and algorithms.

Of histories and heartbreaks.

Of treaties and transactions, laws and lies, rituals and revolutions.

A world shaped by migration and empire, language and labour, collective trauma and quiet resilience.

It’s not simple.

It was never meant to be.

And here’s the real forgetting:

We’ve been taught that we’re separate.

That we’re individuals moving through space, mostly powerless, mostly alone.

That what we think, say, do, or choose barely matters in the big picture.

That the systems are too big, too entrenched, too “out there” to be changed by a single life.

But that’s not true.

That’s not ever been true.

We are part of it. All of it.

We are shaped by the world.

And we are shaping it, every single day.

The conversations we participate in.

The causes we champion—or ignore.

Why we consume.

What we buy, and who we buy it from.

What we normalize.

What we stay silent about.

Who we vote for—or whether we vote at all.

All of it contributes.

All of it ripples.

We are not islands.

We are not observers.

We are threads in the tapestry.

Interdependent. Interconnected. Intertwined.

Physically. Mentally. Emotionally. Energetically.

And yet—so many of us are walking through life believing we are powerless.

And that belief—that lie—may be the most dangerous thing of all.

Because when we believe we don’t matter, we stop participating with care.

When we think nothing we do makes a difference, we stop trying to do anything differently.

When we refuse to acknowledge how complicated things really are, we default to blame.

To division.

To othering.

To scapegoating.

So, yes. The world is complicated.

Painfully so.

There are no easy answers.

There is no single root cause to pull up and heal it all.

But if we can breathe into the complexity—

If we can resist the urge to oversimplify—

We can begin to relate to the world in a different way.

Not as victims of it.

Not as enemies in it.

But as participants in its becoming.

As weavers.

As co-creators.

As agents of change—not in some distant, abstract future, but now.

So, to my friend, and to anyone else sitting in that painful place between love and difference…

I see you.

I know the ache of wanting to stay connected when it would be easier to disconnect.

I know the grief of watching someone you care about cling to a simpler story while you’re learning to live in the tangle.

But please don’t stop.

Don’t stop holding nuance.

Don’t stop seeing the web.

Don’t stop being in it with eyes wide open and heart intact.

Because your presence—your conscious participation—matters more than you know.

You’re not here to fix it all.

But you’re also not here to ignore it all.

You’re here to be part of the weaving.

Thread by thread.

Word by word.

Choice by choice.

Yes, love. Life is complicated.

And that means we are free.

To shift.

To shape.

To create something new.

Together.