The Intersection Between Celebration and Suffering is a Hard-Boiled Egg
Some things that have happened recently:
I recently had a transformative conversation with my friend Ama about my approach to making hard-boiled eggs.
At the time of writing this post, I have recently turned 50 years old.
Also at the time of writing this post, the state of Minnesota is under siege by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), among a litany of cities and states across the United States.
You might be wondering what these three things have to do with each other—and what any of it has to do with your work as an educator. I promise they connect. What emerged from a casual conversation about eggs might offer something for those of us trying to hold joy and horror in concert with one another right now.
The Celebration and the Suffering
I was happy to be celebrating my 50th birthday in many communities from my past and present. In fact, I plan to celebrate all year long. In equal measure, I have been devastated by what's happening in my country, and to be honest, in the world over.
Most acutely, I have never been so aware of ancestral wisdom and suffering as I am now. I think of my grandparents and what they suffered in Europe during the Holocaust. Many people want to trace current events in the United States to the actions of the Nazis in the 1930s and 40s, and I'm apt to draw that parallel, too. But I also know that the Nazis got their playbook from the United States and that ICE is more akin to the slave catchers from our early history. This all matters to me right now.
As people were so quick to eschew and sideline DEI efforts in schools in the past year, they also were unfortunately shelving much of the learning we've had to confront collectively—an education that included a more thorough understanding Black history (and U.S. history), the impact of structural and systemic oppression, and ways of redressing the injustices enacted on marginalized communities. How can I possibly be happy about my birthday when so much is devastating? What is there to celebrate? How do I support educators right now? All of it.
Enter the hard-boiled egg conversation.
13 Minutes of Contemplation
To be honest, I didn't know the egg conversation was going to take the turn it did when Ama and I first started talking. It was a simple question she asked: “Can you remind me about your approach to making hard-boiled eggs?” In addition to making good coffee, hard-boiling eggs is a specialty of mine. I seem to get the details right.
So I walked her through each step: filling the pot half to two-thirds with water, setting it to boil first, then using a slotted spoon to gently guide each egg into the water one at a time—because one egg has wiggle room, margin for error. Then precisely 13 minutes of boiling. Then the shock: running cold water over the eggs or transferring them to a bowl of ice water until they're cool to the touch. The goal is a cleanly peeled shell. And finally, the “David method” of peeling. David was a former student of mine. At my school, there was sometimes a bowl of hard-boiled eggs out at lunch, and I stood over the compost bin, losing half the whites to the shell while also losing my mind. One day David walked over: “Ms. Cohen, you're peeling it wrong. Use your thumb.” Mind blown.
When Ama and I talk, we go deep. Every conversation starts out casual, but soon enough, we're finding transcendent connections in the mundane. As we talked about the egg boiling, some themes emerged:
It's better to hard-boil an egg when you're not too hungry; it takes time
There are many moments in the process that can fail: the egg might explode in the boiling water; the shell might stick no matter what you do
Sometimes, no matter how intentional you are, you can't control the outcome
I told Ama about standing over that compost bin day after day, peeling eggs that refused to cooperate. “Here's the interesting thing,” I said. “This felt a lot like my mindfulness practice—deeply frustrating, required a lot of patience, didn't go the way I wanted it to go.”
And then it hit me: I'd been thinking about all of these steps in hard-boiled eggs to understand how we exist in the intersection between celebration and suffering.
The egg isn't about finding a comfortable middle ground between joy and grief. It's about presence during the process—the 13 minutes of waiting, the care not to crack what's fragile, the acceptance that sometimes the egg cracks and the shell sticks anyway. We don't rush the egg because we're hungry. We can't skip the cold shock because we're impatient. The process asks something of us: attention, patience, and the willingness to accept imperfect outcomes even when we've tried to do everything right.
At every stage of the process, there's an opportunity for success or failure. Boiling the water is probably where you have the greatest chance of success, but what if the stove burner poops out? The egg goes in the water, but what if it explodes? Or the shell sticks and takes half your egg into the compost? Even in the most intentional methods, we exist between these polarities of success and failure, celebration and suffering.
We talked about conditions—how sometimes the circumstances just aren't right, and reaching for a granola bar instead of boiling an egg is the more self-compassionate choice when we’re really hungry. We also talked about what happens when we examine what's actually within our control. That’s also where possibility lives.
Holding it All Together
Here's what I've been sitting with: my instinct to celebrate turning 50 all year long isn't a denial of what's happening around me. It's a form of resistance. Joy in the face of horror is defiance. My grandparents knew this (they got married during the most harrowing time of their lives). Every oppressed community throughout history has known this. Refusing to let despair consume joy is itself an act of survival and solidarity—a reminder that we are alive.
The question isn't whether to celebrate, but how we hold celebration and devastation together without letting either diminish the other.
This is where the egg comes back in the picture. The egg is contemplation—the slow, intentional practice that creates space between the poles of joy and grief, staying present within the tension.
And here's where I keep landing when I think about educators at this moment: You are being asked to perform normalcy for students while carrying grief. You are navigating demands to “stay neutral” when neutrality is complicity. You are exhausted from doing more with less while the ground keeps shifting beneath you. Some of you are directly impacted by what’s happening—your communities, your families, your students living in fear. Some of you are witnessing from a distance, feeling helpless and complicit in equal measure. All of you are being asked to teach, to lead, to show up, to care when caring itself feels unbearable.
I don't have a framework or five steps or a clever acronym to support you through the tension of it all. But I do have the reminders inherent in a hard-boiled egg process. Staying present and taking time for a little contemplation means we don't abandon joy because suffering exists. It means we don't minimize suffering because we need joy to survive. It means we stay present in the tension without demanding that the tension resolve itself on our timeline.
Research on what psychologists call “emotional complexity”—the capacity to hold multiple, even contradictory emotions simultaneously—suggests that this isn't just spiritually wise, but also psychologically healthy. Susan David's work on emotional agility reminds us that rigid responses to difficult circumstances, whether toxic positivity or consuming despair, actually diminish our capacity to respond effectively.
The ability to hold both celebration and suffering, to move fluidly between them without collapsing into either, is what allows us to remain present and purposeful over time.
The Slow and Necessary Work of Discernment
Near the end of our conversation, Ama reflected: “I've been so frustrated lately, like—what do I do? But listening to this, it's like you just do something. It doesn't have to be the perfect spoon. [The water] doesn't have to have the ice. It doesn't have to be the exact thirteen minutes. I don't have to wait for all the conditions to be exactly right. I just boil the egg and see where it goes. And at every step, no matter how it turns out, I get to practice mindfully engaging.”
Mindful engagement is preparation for discerned action.
What action does this moment require of you?
Maybe your next move is showing up to a protest. Maybe it's having a hard conversation with a colleague. Maybe it's protecting a classroom as a sanctuary of belonging. Maybe it's finally resting so you can sustain the long fight ahead.
As you move through this season—whatever it holds for you—I’m curious:
What mundane practice is teaching you to hold lightly without letting go?
What's slowing you down just enough to be discerning about your next move?
Where are you finding the intersection between your own celebrations and the suffering around you?
Here's to imagining what's possible when we stop trying to resolve the tension and instead learn to move within it—cooking our eggs, celebrating our milestones, grieving our losses, fighting our fights. All of it at the same time.
