THE PRINCIPLE OF OPPOSITES

It was a long and excessive, yet fun weekend for me here in Chicago, so I have been inspired to think about balance and the rejection of imbalance.

The ancient Chinese developed a YIN and YANG theory of life. It is a principle of opposites that explains the balance of life. The theory holds that YIN represents everything about the world that is: dark, hidden, passive, receptive, yielding, cool, soft, and feminine. Its opposite, YANG, represents everything about the world that is: illuminated, evident, active, aggressive, controlling, hot, hard, and masculine. Their theory is that everything in the world can be identified as either YIN or YANG.

For instance, their belief is that the earth itself would fall under YIN (not too hard to believe that the life-giving earth is feminine, is it?). And on the other hand, the heavens would fall under YANG (think these designations are part of the male/female power dynamic?). That being said, it’s fairly obvious to see that MAN and WOMAN are the ultimate YANG and YIN.

How does this pertain to men and women’s misunderstandings of each other?

Well… I think modern American society has done us the great disservice of selling us a confusing misnomer: To be equal in our humanity we must be the same in all things. To me, this is both sad and unfortunate because it takes the balance from life.

The truth is: We are not all the same. Men are different from Women. Just as a people’s culture makes them think and consequently behave differently (Take notice that I omitted the phrase RACE. Sometimes I wonder if that phrase is so misused and misunderstood that the word itself conjures racism). That makes people different. But where are we the same? When does equal mean absolutely equivalent?

WE ARE EQUAL IN OUR HUMANITY. But do we have trouble seeing the human in someone else, whether out of admiration, ignorance or disdain?

I have a friend who will often say she is disgusted by, “people who cannot see the human in others.” I’ve found this to be extremely true. There are plenty of ways to tune your eyes to humanity. My question is this: When we tune our eyes to see those parts of humanity which are most easily identifiable or alluring to us, do we blind ourselves to other aspects of humanity? If that’s the case, we’ve taken balance out of our vision of others or our potential mate/friend.

The moment you see the ethnic heritage reflected in the face of someone different, are thoughts immediately formed? Now, those thoughts may be negative or they may be positive, that’s not the question I’m asking. So alternatively, I propose two questions:

1) Do you like/dislike someone different from you because you think you can identify with them?

2) Is there really a difference between having a favorable opinion of someone based on their ancestry verses an unfavorable opinion based on the same characteristic?

The moment you see a member of the opposite sex, are thoughts immediately formed? For instance, if you’ve been hurt by a woman (or a man), do you ascribe those personality traits to WOMEN or MEN as a group?

Believe me, I’m well-aware of the difficulty in finding balance in viewing others. And please… I’m well-aware of “the way things are.” In life, we can only work to convince the world to change its ways. BUT we can DEFINATELY change our own mentality, which changes the world for ourselves, and maybe for some of the people around us.

I think we waste too much time trying to be the same. We make the unfortunate mistake of believing that we can be “just as good” if we make ourselves the same. As a society and as individuals, we try to find cultural or sexual equivalence because we can’t accept the humanity in someone who isn’t the same. In our relationships, some of us spend our time trying to “out-do” our mates in some aspect so we can THINK that we are equivalent (i.e. financially, emotionally, spiritually, aesthetically, philosophically, physically…ah…there’s too many to mention).

There is a balance to life. Too much femininity is not good. Too much masculinity is not good. Personally, I work everyday to be a more complete individual, and most important, a more balanced man. Romantically, I’ll have to find a woman who can complement the best in me. But to have that balance, she’ll have to be as complete or incomplete as I am at that point in our lives. Looks like that will take a whole lot of work.

There are no guarantees on our path in this life. HOWEVER, the more roadblocks we remove, the easier it is to get where we’re going. Have you found the balance between the respective YIN’s and YANG’s in the substance and details of your life? I’m still figuring mine out. But I’m learning.

I do my best to distinguish things that are relevant from things that are not. Different does not mean inferior. Different does not mean irrelevant. Sometimes, those things that are different are needed in order to bring balance to life, love and relationships. The balance in life is to accept that difference exists and appreciate that fundamentally different things will never be the same. We can resolve this potential conflict by accepting the fact that some things were never supposed to be the same, and thank GOD for that.


Peace and Love,

nosthegametoo