The Edge Walker: on holding what refuses to resolve

You live in the in-between.

Most of the advice about thinking clearly involves picking a side. Decide. Commit. Move forward. The edge walker is not against this advice. They just notice that most of the interesting things live exactly where you are being asked not to stand, in the part of the map where two contradictory things are both true and neither will yield to the other no matter how hard you press.

The edge walker does not live there by accident. It is a deliberate practice. When you feel the urge to resolve an ambiguity, you notice the urge, and you ask whether the ambiguity is actually a problem or whether it is the shape of the thing itself. Many ambiguities are the shape of the thing. A grandmother you loved and were hurt by. A career that nourishes you and eats you. A country you are proud of and ashamed of. These are not unresolved arguments waiting for a verdict. They are features of life that would be falsified by any verdict. The edge walker has learned to sit in them without needing to collapse them.

This is often mistaken for indecision. It is not. The edge walker makes decisions. They just refuse to resolve the underlying tension in order to make them. "I am doing this even though both things are true" is a different sentence from "I am doing this because one thing is true and the other was never true". The first is honest. The second is a lie you sometimes tell yourself to move forward. The edge walker prefers the first even when it costs them the easier momentum of the second.

What this looks like day to day

It looks like refusing to answer the question "so do you like it or not" about a book, a film or a colleague. You like it. You also see what is wrong with it. Both are true. The person asking wants you to simplify, and you won't, not out of pedantry but because the simplification would falsify the truth.

It looks like a quiet distaste for hot takes. Not because hot takes are wrong. Because they require collapsing a surface that does not collapse cleanly, and the collapse always loses something you were trying to protect.

It looks like taking longer to write an email than a friend takes, because the friend has settled on a position and you keep holding both of yours. Eventually the email gets written. It carries more qualifications than your friend's version. Some readers find this annoying. Some readers, the ones you trust most, find it honest.

It looks like being drawn to people who do not fit. The person in a progressive city who holds one conservative belief. The academic who spends weekends fixing motorcycles. The priest who went to medical school. You are not interested in them because of the tension. You are interested because the tension is the signal that something real is happening. Smooth people are often smooth because they have sanded off the edges that matter.

It looks like knowing that some arguments are not actually about what they seem to be about, and that arguing them on the surface terms will produce a winner and no progress. The edge walker tries, sometimes awkwardly, to name the deeper thing. Sometimes this works and the argument shifts. Sometimes the other person says "stop being evasive" and you are. You are evading the false binary that the argument was pretending to contain.

The shadow side

The edge walker can hide inside the tension.

There are moments where both things are not equally true. One is more true. Sometimes a lot more true. The edge walker's reflex is to protect the contradiction, and that reflex occasionally runs when it shouldn't. You end up refusing to say the honest thing, which is "actually, mostly this one", because you have trained yourself to hold two positions and the training has started holding you.

The edge walker can also treat complexity as a performance. Saying "it's complicated" about a thing that is actually not complicated is a way of sounding wise. The edge walker is particularly vulnerable to this because their genuine insight, when applied, does look like "it's complicated". The genuine version has done the work. The performance version has not. Both sound the same. The difference is whether the speaker can name the specific tensions or is just gesturing toward "tensions".

The third shadow is slower. The edge walker can become allergic to commitment. Commitments resolve ambiguity. The edge walker, over time, may accumulate a pile of held-open questions whose cost of holding has started exceeding the cost of answering. "I don't know yet" is a powerful sentence for the first month. By the third year, it has started to be the thing preventing a life from happening.

Who they remind us of

Walt Whitman famously wrote: "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes." He was the first modern poet to argue that the contradiction was a feature, not a bug. Leaves of Grass is a document of held tension. It does not resolve. It gathers.

Iris Murdoch wrote novels that refuse to come down on a side. Her characters are often wrong in interesting ways, and the novels do not punish them for their wrongness or reward them for a later rightness. The books are exercises in watching people hold incompatible beliefs at once and proceed anyway. Which is, she argued, how most lives are actually lived.

Zadie Smith's essays hold together positions her friends would assume are incompatible. She is a novelist who writes about the limits of novels. She is a critic who writes about the loneliness of criticism. Feel Free is the collection where this is clearest.

James Baldwin refused to choose between "America is beautiful" and "America has done monstrous things". He insisted on both, simultaneously, at full volume. The difficulty of his essays is the difficulty of holding those two sentences at once without flinching, which he did, for forty years, without flinching.

Robert Caro has spent fifty years on one biography of Lyndon Johnson. The project refuses to let Johnson be a hero or a villain, even when the evidence in a given chapter would support either conclusion. Caro holds both, and the holding is what makes the biography a great one.

Further reading

• Song of Myself by Walt Whitman. Start with section 51. Then read the rest.
• The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch. A novel about a man who will not resolve what he wants.
• Feel Free by Zadie Smith. Essays that hold multiple sides on purpose.
• The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin. The masterclass in refusing false resolution.
• The Passage of Power by Robert Caro. Volume four. You do not need the other three to start.

Take the quiz and see whether this is your shape, or which of the other five is.