I Forgot to Practice What I Already Knew

When news broke that the U.S. had bombed Iran, I felt what a lot of people in my circle felt. Anger. Disgust. Frustration. I went where I usually go, to the people I follow, the people I trust.

And honestly, where else do you go anymore?

We’re living in a moment where it’s genuinely hard to know what to trust. Every outlet has an angle. Every algorithm feeds you more of what you already believe. And now with AI generating content that looks indistinguishable from real reporting, the question of what’s even real has become exhausting to answer. So we default to the voices that feel familiar. The ones that confirm what we already think. Not because we’re lazy. Because we’re overwhelmed.

And then a friend stopped me cold.

She’s someone I’ve known for a few years. Someone whose lineage stems from that region of the world. Someone I love and respect and have had intimate, meaningful conversations with. She posted a split screen video without much commentary. She didn’t need to say much.

On one side: Iranian women. Voraciously celebrating. Dancing in the streets. Tears and raised fists and the kind of joy that doesn’t perform, it erupts. Women who have been silenced, controlled, and oppressed for decades finally breathing open air.

On the other side: American women protesting the bombing.

My heart raced. My hands got a little sweaty. And then something cracked open in me that I wasn’t expecting.

Not defensiveness. Not argument. Grief, first. Then compassion. Then joy, watching those women celebrate something I take for granted every single day.

I reached out to her privately and thanked her. I told her I couldn’t have known. I couldn’t have seen that perspective from inside my own echo chamber, not knowing the history, consuming the same voices.

She told me she’d been staying quieter lately. That she’s been harassed for sharing her perspective, especially by women who look like me. And I told her please don’t stop. Please keep talking. People like me need the gut punch.

I want to be clear about something. I don’t believe Trump bombed Iran because he cared about the freedom of Iranian women. I don’t think liberating an oppressed population was the motivation. There are plenty of people who believe this was about distraction, about power, about shifting attention away from other things entirely. And they may be right.

But here’s where it gets complicated. Here’s where the gray area actually lives.

The intention behind an action and the impact of that action are not always the same thing. Something can come from a place you don’t trust and still produce something worth celebrating. Those women dancing in the streets are real. Their joy is real. Their freedom, whatever shape it takes from here, is real. And I am not willing to dismiss that because I don’t like the man who may have inadvertently made it possible.

That’s not hypocrisy. That’s complexity. And we need to get better at holding both.

Carl Jung wrote: “The paradox is one of our most valued spiritual possessions, while uniformity of meaning is a sign of weakness.”

I’ve been sitting with that line since this all happened. Because what he’s describing is exactly what we’re losing. The ability to hold two things at once. The willingness to stay in the tension instead of rushing to the side that feels safest.

Here’s what I keep coming back to:

We do not live in a dichotomy. The world is not divided cleanly into right and wrong, good and bad, us and them — even when every algorithm, every headline, and every outrage cycle is designed to make us feel like it is. Division is easier to sell than complexity. A population that sees only two sides is easier to manage than one willing to sit in the gray.

I teach this. I believe this. And I still got caught in it.

That’s not a character flaw. That’s what happens when we only let in the voices that already agree with us. We stop being curious. We start being certain. And certainty, unchecked, is just a more comfortable version of being asleep.

And the information landscape we’re living in right now makes it harder than ever. When you can’t always verify what’s real, when the news you consume is curated by systems designed to keep you engaged rather than informed, when the people around you are working from entirely different sets of facts — staying curious takes actual effort. It takes humility. It takes a willingness to say I might not have the full picture even when everything you’re seeing confirms that you do.

My friend gave me that reminder. Not with an argument. With a video. With her own quiet courage to keep posting her truth even when it costs her.

I’m not asking you to change your politics. I’m not asking you to support something you believe is wrong. I’m not asking you to make peace with things that genuinely threaten people’s safety and dignity.

I’m asking you to stay curious. To find the one person in your life whose perspective genuinely challenges yours — not to fight with them, but to actually hear them. To ask what they’re seeing that you might not be.

Because the gray area isn’t weakness. It’s where the truth usually lives.

And sometimes it takes a friend willing to post the thing that stops you cold to remind you of what you already know but forgot to practice.

I’m grateful she did.

And I’m grateful I was still open enough to let it land.

That openness didn’t come naturally to me. It came from years of doing the kind of work we now teach — learning to sit with discomfort instead of running from it, learning to get curious instead of certain, learning to see the gray instead of defaulting to the side that felt safest.

If any of this resonated and you want to explore what that work looks like for you or your team, this is exactly what we do at MotivAction®. Come find us at MotivAction.academy.