Inside Out

    The other day I celebrated turning 69, my yin-yang birthday; to infinity and beyond as Buzz Lightyear might say (is that even possible, to go "beyond" infinity?)  Without getting too carried away, I am hoping that this year marks one of balance for me, a year ahead of give and take, and of good and evil positioning themselves in order to gain balance.  As Wikipedia put it: In Ancient Chinese philosophy, yin and yang is a concept of dualism, describing how seemingly opposite or contrary forces may actually be complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world, and how they may give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another...Yin is the receptive and Yang the active principle, seen in all forms of change and difference such as the annual cycle (winter and summer), the landscape (north-facing shade and south-facing brightness), sexual coupling (female and male), the formation of both women and men as characters and sociopolitical history (disorder and order)...In Taoist metaphysics, distinctions between good and bad, along with other dichotomous moral judgments, are perceptual, not real; so, the duality of yin and yang is an indivisible whole.   This re-balancing may explain why these posts have seemed a bit more difficult to write for me of late, even as I continue to read and watch and listen; I seem to be doing everything except "experiencing."  Here's how the London Review of Books discussed the feeling: It is not for nothing that, in the age of the digital platform, we use liquid metaphors of ‘feeds’, ‘torrents’ and ‘streams’ to describe the way images, sounds and words surround us.  In the midst of an online experience of one sort or another, clicking a button marked ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ is about as much critical activity as we are permitted.  For services such as Netflix or Amazon, the design challenge is how to satisfy customers’ desires with the minimum of effort or choice, largely on the basis of what they have liked –or not– in the past....The perennial question, when it comes to so much up-voting and down-voting, is who can be bothered to ‘vote’ at all.  The passionately positive and the passionately negative can usually be relied on to take part....Acclaim and complaint can eventually become deafening, drowning out other voices.  It’s not only that cultural and political polarisation makes it harder for different ‘sides’ to understand one another, although that is no doubt true.  It makes it harder to understand your own behaviour and culture as well.  When your main relationship to an artefact is that you liked it, clicked it or viewed it, and your main relationship to a political position is that you voted for it, what is left to say?  And what is there to say of the alternative view, other than that it’s not yours?

Yin Yang image: FreePix

    If something happened to me today and I had to rate my life's "journey" (with one being "didn't care for it at all" and ten being "loved it), I would likely give it a 10.  Admittedly it wasn't perfect since I pretty much grew up in poverty and lived as a child in housing projects; but overall I would say that life even then was great.  I may not have emerged the sports/rock/movie star, or the Nelson Mandela/Mother Theresa/Mohandas Karamchand Ghandi, but then after now looking back nearly seven decades, I had to admit that I had emerged pretty much unscathed...relatively good health, steady work for nearly four decades, a wide circle of friends, one terrific wife (we just had our 31st anniversary)...but indeed, and despite all of that good, something was appearing out of balance.  Here's how Mark O'Connell put it in his new book, Notes From An Apocalypse: We are alive in a time of worst-case scenarios.  The world we have inherited seems exhausted, destined for an absolute and final unraveling.  Look: there are fascists in the street, and in the palaces.  Look: the weather has gone uncanny, volatile, malevolent.  The wealth and power of nominal democracies is increasingly concentrated in the hands of smaller and more heedless minorities, while life becomes more precarious for ever larger numbers of people.  The old alliances, the postwar dispensations, are lately subject to a dire subsidence.  The elaborate stage settings of global politics, the drawing rooms and chandeliers, are being dismantled, disappearing off into the wings, laying bare the crude machinery of capital.  The last remaining truth is the supreme fiction of money, and we are up to our necks in a rising sludge of decomposing facts.  Yikes.  Things aren't that bad, are they?  When O'Connell was asked to describe the word "fragile," he answered: What I think about when I say the word fragile is death.  The fragility of life.  And the unpredictability of the future.  It's the same thing.

    I thought about his words for a bit, and indeed it's pretty easy to slide into that state of being fearful of what lies ahead.  When the work or the money or the body stops or falters, your viewpoint of life being rosy can shift pretty easily into one of worry and dread.  The addicted, the trafficked, the abused, the poor, the disabled, the unappreciated...the person who now wonders if he will ever get off the ventilator because somehow, somewhere, some person unknowingly gave him a virus that even his doctor doesn't understand.  For the many of us who can sit back and "thank our lucky stars" that few if any of the above things affects or has affected us, we may think that such talk of a doomed future --melting glaciers, bugs and animals going extinct, forests heading into oblivion, chemicals entering our water tables-- why pshaw, bah-humbug, overall things aren't really that bad, or at least that was how I wanted to view things in my once-balanced world.  But now my friends' opinions seem to bridge opposite ends of the Grand Canyon: it's no worse than the flu echoed against the rising Covid-death numbers; it's hotter and colder as it's been throughout history said one side vs. the other noticing an ever-increasing level of carbon dioxide leaving our smokestacks and exhaust pipes; the Amazon and other forests having almost limitless amounts of wood vs. another visit to the stocked shelves of Home Depot; most plastic gets recycled one group mumbled but 91% really doesn't said the other (plastic can now be found in the sea ice of Antarctica); no one tells me what to do said one side, so then why are you telling women what to do, said the other (a good read on this is a piece in the NY Review of Books on why Roe vs. Wade may not hold up under the old argument of acting precedent).  I don't remember having this sort of thing happen so regularly in my once "normal" life, or at least I don't remember hearing such sectarian banter continue in such a loud manner.  And it was right about then that a child smiled at me...

   It was the other day, hot and summery with the outdoor pool at the rec center filled with swim teams, and the indoor pool just now emptying out of little 8-year old boys and girls finishing their swim lessons.  As I passed a group of youngsters giggling and wrapped in their towels and trunks and wet hair, one stopped and looked me in the eye with a smile and brightly said, "hello."  It was as welcome as a handshake or an ice cream cone on a hot day, even though it felt as if a bucket of ice had been dumped over me, slapping me out of this downward cycle of wonder and self-doubt.  His little second of time to stop and say hello reminded me that there was always time to brighten another's day; that while our world may be witnessing protesting and struggling and people growing frustrated and angry, it was also seeing generosity and people revealing what they were capable of in helping others; it reminded me that we may now care more about a room full of sweaty doctors and nurses than we do a room full of people dressed in designer dresses and tuxedos at an award show; and that we may now have more respect for the struggling farmer than we do for the struggling major league ball player.  Nowhere is this more visible than in Australia where artists are taking to painting silos with messages of hope and perseverance and strength and stamina, tall storage silos that let others driving by that we will all get through this, that balance will return. 

Kimba Australian Silos painted by Cam Scale.  Photo: Annette Green

   For me, it took a child to remind me that good and bad are constantly shifting, constantly swaying back and forth and repositioning themselves; but eventually there is a return to balance.  For me, it was a child stopping to say "hello," that and a book about slime (as the book jacket says: How Algae Created Us, Plague Us, and Just Might Save Us...There are as many algae on Earth as stars in the universe.)   Trust me, that is one fascinating story in our struggle for life...ahh, but that's another post.