But although idealism and human experience are difficult to reconcile satisfactorily, nowhere in the essay does Emerson suggest that one must be chosen over the other. They are coexistent elements, not mutually exclusive. They merge into one another by graded steps, "life above life, in infinite degrees." Emerson urges us to keep our sights on the ultimate purpose of our existence — to understand our place in the universe and our relationship to God and nature — but at the same time to live life as it is, not worrying too much about the discrepancy between the two. "Life is not dialectics," he writes. It must be lived on its own terms, not confused with the higher realm that exists side by side with it and that surpasses it in significance. Our experience of daily life will eventually contribute toward a broader sense of the universal.
Emerson asserts that the specific societal forms, personal relationships, and human conditions that constitute our experience are, in the long run and from the broad view, insignificant. We may thrive as spiritual beings as well under one set of conventions and circumstances as under another. He advocates avoidance of wasting precious energy on trying to alter the externals of life. We may find meaning in even the most trivial transactions and relationships:
I settle myself ever firmer in the creed, that we should not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with, accepting our actual companions and circumstances, however humble or odious, as the mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated its whole pleasure for us.
Moreover, he recommends embracing life, not merely grimly accepting it. He distinguishes between two points of view that we might describe today as the difference between seeing the glass half-empty and seeing it half-full:
I compared notes with one of my friends who expects everything of the universe, and is disappointed when anything is less than the best, and I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate goods. I accept the clangor and jangle of contrary tendencies. I find my accounts in sots [drunkards] and bores also. . . . If we will take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall have heaping measures.
In attempting to analyze experience too closely, we fail to get from it what we can. Its lessons are learned "on the highway" — along the way, in the course of life, not through conscious intent to make sense of it. Emerson advises a tolerant, balanced approach, one that incorporates power (divinely granted and intuitively realized life force) and form (the particular external structures through which we express ourselves). We should aim toward the "middle region of our being," the "temperate zone," the "mid-world," the "equator of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry, — a narrow belt." There we may both live life as we must and yet remain open to higher reality.
