Author F. Scott Fitzgerald said that “the test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
This saying is not only true of thoughts but of feelings also. Have you ever conceded that to live fully you need to be able to embrace the feeling (as opposed to the idea) that you are going to die?
Have you ever felt immense love for someone and also experienced hate towards the same person? Have you ever felt immensely powerful and seconds later totally powerless? Have you realised that you cannot breathe in, without breathing out?
Have you wondered that if life is associated with the in- breath as when a child is born, that death is associated with the out- breath but more importantly that these two diametrically opposite polarities are moving backwards and forwards every waking and sleeping moment?
The ability to be truly positive is only a theory, because the negative usually has more sway with the mind of wo/man. The reality is that we swing from positive to negative every moment, just as we swing from love to hate also.
The fact that mostly we find it difficult to embrace the polarities is the reason why the negative is usually more appealing existentially. By THAT I mean, that as we are conditioned (namely raised as children and fully conditioned by the time we are adults) we seem to be more attracted to bad news, bad press or bad things said about others, including gossip that will trigger our negative polarity.
It seems the real art is to hold close to us the paradox of life and the dialectics of life, such as love/hate, life/death, in breath/out breath, like/dislike and all the other manifestations of the mind that are ordinarily associated with how we think and feel.
How do you cope with the extremes of life?
Image Credit: FreeImages.com-Michal Zacharzewski
Chris Borrett