Individual as an indivisible duality

Light and Dark. Good and Bad. Chaos and Order. Grief and Love.

Imagine painting a mural from an inch away. Imagine raising a child where it is always about warmth and nurture. Imagine being a boss where you are constantly breathing down your employee’s neck. Imagine being a winner who has never lost. Imagine loving someone so much that their loss leaves no grief.

Pleasure and pain, desire and contentment, grief and love, success and failure, order and chaos. These dualities come as a pair and one cannot exist without the other. The tussle between the these two opposing forces and the eventual union, is where we grow the most. Contradictions reveal our underlying, unknown assumptions.

Although I am talking about individuals here, the concept of opposite forces bringing about growth is true in ‘‘inanimate’’ fields as well. Mathematics, for instance, was broken down and build back up by paradoxes. Zeno’s paradox (5th century BC) proposed that motion is impossible because to cover any distance, you would first have to cover half the distance. And then to cover half the distance, you would have to cover 1/4th and so on and so forth. Such a paradoxical notion led to the birth of calculus, limits and infinite series. It also exposed the incorrect assumption that it take an infinite amount of time to finish an infinite number of tasks. Russels paradox, which is anthropomorphized as the ‘Barber’s paradox’**, exposed foundational flaws in set theory. The Liar Paradox *** led to Godel’s incompleteness theorem. These were all instances where mathematical foundation was reduced to ashes but it rose from those ashes with renewed vigor. Contradictions point to the exact location of growth. It marks an ‘X’ on the location we ought to dig to transcend the what currently exists.

An experience does not become whole until we consolidate fundamentally opposing forces. I demonstrated this with mathematics but the same principle is applicable to other walks of life, including running a business, which in my opinion, is the most brutal reality check. Here, you see the palpable tension between order and chaos, between youth and wisdom. Youth is energy, potential and exploration. Wisdom needs to stoke the embers of youth else it will be engulfed in its own flames. Similarly, growing your expertise in your field is a controlled, deliberate chaos. It is part of ‘growing pains.’

So far I have talked about making a whole from seemingly contradictory (complimentary) parts. This idea is evident if we were to reverse engineer ‘the whole’. If you have ever seen a clay pot being made, dear reader, you will see that one hand moulds the clay whereas the other hand buttresses it[1]. Without the hand that moulds, the pot will not change. Without the hand that buttresses, the pot will collapse into a pile of mud.

A person with their myriad emotions, a field of study with it’s paradoxes, a business with its growing pains, a pot of clay shaped by two opposing hands— all such individual entities are a home to indivisible dualities. I, for one, am learning how to dance where these dualities meet, at the edge of order and chaos, light and shadow, known and unknown, whatever it may be!

References

** The Barber’s paradox is as follows: “There is a village where a barber shaves all men and only those men who do not shave themselves. The paradox arises when one asks, “Who shaves the barber?” If the barber does not shave himself, then he ought to shave himself cuz a barber shaves anyone who does not shave himself. However, if the barber does shave himself, then he violates the earlier statement.

*** Liar’s paradox: “This sentence is false”

[1] My dad told me how clay pots are made when we were tossing around ideas for this essay. Here’s a video of the process.

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