Abby Paradis has been seeing something her whole life that she’s never had the words for. Not a metaphor, an actual visual field, moving, wobbling, telling her when something is off before she can explain why. She thought everyone had it until she found out they didn’t. Then she suffered a concussion that made communicating it to others even more challenging.
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Abby’s back for round two. When I first started Authbition, it was a solo show. Abby jumped in, breaking ground as the first guest. And now she’s in the two-timers club.
This show was recorded several months ago while sitting outside my Airstream while in The New York Finger Lakes. At some point, unexpectedly, mowers show up in the background and we put the noise canceling capability of Airpods and Zoom to the test.
Why did it take so long to publish after recording? This has been a major bottleneck for me, personally, to record, edit, and publish shows. Authbition is currently in a transition. We’ve hired a production company!
Over the next few weeks, you’ll see some changes. I’ll be especially interested in hearing about how you like them.
Abby and I started with how she ended up where she lives now, a farm village outside Reus, Catalunya, population not quite seven thousand, everybody knows everybody. It happened almost by accident: a college friend she hadn’t spoken to in sixteen years met a couple from the village on a random trip to a Caribbean island, mentioned he had a friend in Spain, and that was it. She was pregnant with her oldest at the time, living somewhere hilly with a stroller, and the deciding question was simply, is it flat.
That story became the doorway into something much bigger. Abby has had five concussions. The fifth was serious enough that, for a long stretch afterward, she couldn’t advocate for herself at all, not because no one was listening, but because her own thoughts weren’t organizing into words that made sense to anyone, herself included. People kept telling her she seemed fine. She wasn’t able to explain that she wasn’t.
Underneath that is something she’s carried since childhood, long before any concussion: a kind of perception she calls noetic, close to synesthesia but not quite, a visual field that shifts and wobbles when something doesn’t sit right, whether that’s a belief of hers or someone else’s. She assumed everyone had it until she realized they didn’t. What she’s built from it, over years of yoga practice, is a working theory that yoga is a kind of technology, not for flexibility of the body but flexibility of perception, training you to hold two true things at once instead of needing one of them to be wrong.
That idea became the thread for the rest of the conversation. We talked about why dogmatic religion and dogmatic science bother me for the same reason, not because the underlying texts or math are wrong, but because the institutions built on top of them forget they’re one version of the truth, not the only one. We got into marketing archetypes and why Darth Vader works precisely because he never breaks character. We talked about why adolescents aren’t a deficit state, why a nine-year-old teaching adults to use a bandsaw is exactly as capable as he believes himself to be, and why the most useful thing you can teach a kid might be how to find an answer, not how to memorize one. Abby homeschools her kids for exactly this reason, hands-on and self-directed, though a landlord dispute forced her oldest into traditional school for a stretch, a change her daughter has been vocally unhappy about ever since.
We landed, by the end, on the line that gives this episode its title. Certainty isn’t truth. The ambiguity is the truth. And the more you can sit inside that without needing to win, the less adversarial the whole world starts to feel.
We didn’t play a formal round, I mentioned the game but we ran out of runway before getting to it. Two tension pairs showed up organically in the conversation, either one plays the game well if you want to run it for real:
Option one: Certainty & Ambiguity.
The best of Certainty is having something working for you, a grandmother doing rosary beads every single day without ever needing to explain why, a foundation solid enough to just stand on.
The worst of Certainty is rigidity dressed up as truth, the one right math, the one right religion, the one right way to run a classroom, and the quieter danger of assuming you already understand something before you’ve actually gone looking.
The best of Ambiguity is the flexibility to hold two true things at once, to shift into someone else’s orientation and find their logic completely coherent even when it isn’t yours.
The worst of Ambiguity is what Abby lived through after her fifth concussion: total incoherence, no plan, not even a path, unable to organize a thought long enough to hand it to someone else.
Together at their best, Certainty & Ambiguity look like a yoga pose held with total effort and total release at the same time, moving through the world with conviction while staying genuinely open to being wrong.
Together at their worst, they trap you bouncing between dogma and chaos, never finding the position that lets you actually engage.
Ways to live the synergy and dodge the trap: put yourself in the position for the good thing to happen instead of forcing it (the yoga block, the hands-on assist, the friend who happens to know somebody), and practice the muscle somewhere low stakes, a wrong turn, a guitar chord, a math problem, before you need it for something that actually matters.
Option two: Pursue & Surrender.
I raised this pairing early in the conversation, before either of us had named the game.
The best of Pursue is the intention that puts you in the room in the first place, choosing to move to Spain, choosing to show up on the mat, choosing to open the door.
The worst of Pursue is the grip, trying so hard to force an outcome that you talk yourself out of the very thing you’re reaching for.
The best of Surrender is receiving what actually shows up, the totally random introduction that only worked because Abby had already said yes to being open to it.
The worst of Surrender is mistaking drift for peace, having no plan and calling it faith when really it’s just being lost.
Together at their best, Pursue & Surrender look like the yoga pose I described, full effort and full release held at once, doing the work to be in the position and then letting go of how it turns out.
Together at their worst, they trap you either white-knuckling a result that was never going to bend, or hiding behind surrender to avoid ever committing to a direction.
Ways to live the synergy and dodge the trap: make the intention, then loosen the grip on the outcome, and notice honestly whether you’re surrendering or just avoiding the harder choice.
A few different people are going to hear themselves in this one. If you’re a parent circling the idea of pulling your kids out of a traditional classroom, or you’ve already done it, Abby’s account of self-directed, hands-on homeschooling lands right in the middle of a fast-growing conversation right now.
Microschools and self-directed learning are reportedly growing faster than homeschooling itself, and the core question underneath all of it is the one Abby keeps coming back to: are you treating your kids like they’re already capable, or like they need to be brought up to capable?
If you’ve ever lived with an injury or a way of thinking that nobody else could see, the language for what Abby describes after her fifth concussion, unable to advocate for herself while everyone around her insisted she seemed fine, has a name that’s getting real attention lately
The invisible injury.
This episode is a rare, specific, first-person account of what that actually feels like from inside it.
And if you practice yoga, or meditation, or any kind of contemplative practice and have never quite had language for why it works beyond the physical, Abby’s framing of it as a technology for tolerating ambiguity gives you a way to talk about it that isn’t just “it’s relaxing.”
It’s a real, researchable idea, psychological flexibility and tolerance of ambiguity show up throughout the current wellness and resilience literature as something that can be trained.
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Abby Paradis first appeared on the show as A009, “I’m Not Here to Shape Her,” on parenting as observation rather than control. Between then and now she’s kept writing, personal essays on Medium under the line “Allowing my evolution to speak to your evolution using words as medium,” contributing to publications including Age of Empathy, Cultured, Publishous, Know Thyself Heal Thyself, and The Virago.
She lives with her family in a small farm village outside Reus, in Catalunya, Spain, where she homeschools her kids with a self-directed, hands-on approach built around whatever tool or medium they’re trying to master next.
Find her writing on Medium: https://medium.com/@abby.paradis
Thanks to Abby Paradis for coming back for round two, and for being generous enough to talk openly about something as hard to put into words as this one. Go check out her writing on Medium, linked above.
And thanks to everyone following along with Authbition as this show continues to grow into what it’s becoming.
This show was produced by The AGN Group. Design by Stefanie Morejon. Intro music by Jeff Tollefson.
Thank you for reading and listening.
Health, happiness, kindness, respect
for every being and all things.
— Andrew