I’m on a stoop of a house on a warm Fort Collins morning. All is well. There hasn’t been much thinking these days, aside from woah, I have no thoughts. Why don’t I have any thoughts? (I guess I didn’t realize how essential writing was for drawing things to the surface...I guess writing gives shape to the shapeless.)
My quarantine practice of working out, meditating, and writing has dissolved quite a bit, but in a grander solution.
That analogy works quite well actually, because I’ve really been going with the flow this past week, whatever that means.
Been doing a lot of driving. Driving solo.
I catch myself breathing a lot.
I mean, I’d hope so, but more in the sense I catch myself aware of breath, of life, of place, and of self.
I need people. I’m ready for roots.
If energy creates magnetism and magnetism creates draw, then we, as people, are mobile force fields, either attracting or repelling.
In n out, give n take.
It’s all of these dichotomies.
God, I hate that word.
Today’s meditation was on that exact idea, dichotomies.
There’s even a certain magnetism to that word, the “division or contrast between two things that are or are represented as being opposed or entirely different” according to Webster.
Though they are different, they are one. Two ends of the same chord.
Funny that this idea’s coming up again because a couple weeks ago an idea came to me in a very abstract, non-linear form: that for each nuanced emotion we experience, there’s an equal and opposite emotion that counteracts it (very Newtonian), and in some intangible way those blips of time escape the linear realm and are one in the same. That, in simplest terms, the moments when we’re sad are directly tethered to the moments where we’re happy, and in that, we are, in ourselves, the balancing force in our lives.
There’s a notion out there that kindly suggests that in order to feel the heights of happiness we must feel the depths of pain and sorrow. But I think it goes farther than mere suggestion. If all my highs and lows are the opposing heights as perhaps the jagged peaks of an EKG graph, my secondary claim is: not only are highs and lows likely, they are inevitable in the same quantity and same amplitude. That if, at the end of your lifetime, you could somehow quantify the sum of all highs and the sum of all lows, they would cancel out.
At the end of the day, I don’t think beliefs in themselves matter. The very secular, and spiritually removed part of myself urges me to believe beliefs as a means to and end.
Believe whatever the fuck you want if it makes you show up better in this life.