Good vs. Evil. Black and White moral choices. Joy or Despair. Life or Death.
Our language and thinking is full of dichotomy. We often go as far as to define things by their opposites. “Darkness is the absence of Light.” We do this to the point where, effectively, neither of the things can exist without the other.
Call it a limitation of our senses or a lack of imagination in how we make sense of the world around and within us, but this is how the majority of people out in the world think. (It’s even a core theme in our entertainment and spiritual beliefs.)
The reality, however, is that the majority of life is a Grey area.
Extremes Don’t Last
While there is truth in the idea of opposites–important truth, at that–the world we live in rarely descends (or ascends) to one end of the continuum or the other.
The vast majority of the time, what we’re experiencing is some mix of those absolutes we so love to compare.
It’s hard to see, sometimes, because we are so steeped in our thoughts of sharp, black and white divisions of things… but the world is mostly some shade of grey. Some dynamic mix of good and bad (or whatever) that changes moment to moment.
Our reality doesn’t deal well with those “pure” extremes. They have no real place in functional reality other than as reference points.
In the real world, extremes don’t last: they burn out and descend (or ascend) into a mix.
The Trap of Illusions
Because we so often think in dichotomy, though, it’s easy to fool ourselves into thinking what we’re experiencing is an extreme.
“This person is pure evil.”
“There’s nothing worse than this.”
“I’ll never be happier than I am right now.”
Or the most dangerous, in my opinion, “Everything’s perfect.”
Ideas like these blind us to the reality of nuance in a situation. Nuance is the fulcrum that we use to change things–noticing it is what accentuates our ability to alter a situation (especially for the better).
If we’re stuck in the mindset of something being absolute, we risk falling into believing it’s also unchanging. (Because absolutes, by their very definition, do not change.)
It Takes Rising and Falling to Live
Nothing in this world is all good or all bad. If you strive for the perfection of an absolute ideal, you will destroy yourself as surely as you would if you believed everything was its opposite.
Breathing requires inhaling and exhaling. You can’t just do all of one. There needs to be the ebb and the flow. The rise and the fall of your chest. The expansion and contraction of your lungs. The contraction and release of your heartbeat.
Without the give and take, they dynamic equilibrium of life itself, we’re dooming ourselves to never experience the full, real, beauty and power of the world.
After all, what are beauty and power without some ugliness and weakness? Just empty ideas that we could never really explain.
The Universe is so much more full than that.
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