A-N-D

And. Such a simple, common word. But it's the fundamental element of life.

The night after the Columbine school shooting, I was playing pool with a buddy in a bar on the South Side of Pittsburgh.

We had just started our first game of eight-ball when my friend confronted the proverbial elephant in the room.

“How can we be here, shooting pool and drinking beer and joking around, when 13 kids were gunned down yesterday?,” she asked, and then set aside her stick.

I don’t remember exactly how I replied. But I know how I would answer today. With just one word:

“And.”

I owe this idea to New Yorker writer Kathryn Schulz, who was interviewed in The New York Times this spring in a wonderful article titled “Our Lives Are an Endless Series of ‘And.’”

Schulz describes how her father was dying while she and her partner were falling in love.

If she hadn’t been close to her father, this would have been an easily manageable juggle.

But the reality was, Schulz adored and respected her father, who was born in Israel in the violent, tumultuous years after the country’s founding.

So how did she manage to grieve the loss of her father and enjoy the blooming of a romantic relationship in the same space of time?

“This actually is the fundamental nature of life,” Schulz told her interviewer, the Times’ Ezra Klein. “ We are always dealing with more than one thing at once. Sometimes they’re profoundly contradictory, sometimes they’re just deeply unrelated. And yet somehow we have to spread our attention among them.”

Oh, life would be so much simpler if everything unfolded in a tidy sequence, one thing ends and then the next thing begins, and on and on, with no overlap.

The reality is, we’re constantly dealing with simultaneous situations, each of which places demands on our attention.

This brings to mind a ritual I enjoyed at our family dinner table for a few years. We called it “Good and Bad.” We would go around the table and describe at least one good thing and one bad thing that happened to us during the day.

Maybe it was just a way to stimulate conversation and steer us away from our phones. But it had the effect, at least subliminally, of teaching our daughter that life is always a mix of good and bad, arising in the exact same day.

This same bifurcated perspective can be applied to our lives as a whole.

All of us have experienced heartbreak and anguish, some of us to a greater degree, some to a lesser one. The suffering we have endured is a given. It does not need to be denied; it should not be a source of shame.

But we must ask ourselves: Now that we have lived through tragedy, what do we do next? What can we do now to improve our situation, our lot in life?

This is where “and” comes in.

You can acknowledge the negative events and experiences in your past and enjoy a beautiful sunset in the present. The alternative is unremitting sorrow.

The great thing about “and” is its implied linearity. There is and always will be something else coming down the pike to posit itself on the second half of the “and.”

As the Buddhists know and preach, no matter how bad something is, at least it’s impermanent. An event or phenomenon will arise on that second half, invariably. Until death, anyway.

So this is our challenge: To find a healthy balance between acknowledging the bad and appreciating the good in our days, in our lives and in the world. To find a level of comfort with the inevitability of good and bad manifesting concurrently.

I don’t know of any formula or precise instructions for achieving this balance, this comfort. But I promise you there exists a middle ground between wallowing in unrelenting despair and living in ignorant bliss.

If there’s a cheat code, it is to remain present, as much as possible. Whatever you’re doing, whatever you’re experiencing, give it your full attention.

There is an urgency to the imperative of feeling the bad and appreciating the good. We are living in a chaotic, violent, turbulent period of history, I’m sure you noticed.

Sure, you can look the other way and ignore what’s happening in our country, in our world. But I don’t advise it. Do what you can to heal the world – tikkun olam, anybody? – and enjoy your time with friends and family.

A-n-d. Just three letters. But the word is profound.