2 Sides to a Coin

If you've ever read any of the Sandman comics, you should be familiar with the characters Dream, Delirium and Destruction and the graphic novel 'Sandman - Brief Lives'. In Brief Lives, the climax of the story was when Destruction explains to Dream certain profound truths about existence and life. He makes the point that all lives are brief, and our time on this world is limited. Our experiences in this world are a yin-yang kind of duality - nothing exists absolutely as itself alone.

It is kind of obvious sometimes - whenever there is light, we do not see darkness. Where there is a fire, I do not feel cold. Our descriptions of our experiences and the entities around us all have dual, exclusive properties - when something is hot, it is not cold. When I can see, it is not dark. Thus, there are 2 sides to every coin, for every experience will have its opposite.

There is certainly something else other than extremes, what we have always termed shades of grey, probabilities, fuzzy logic. Imagine all experiences of temperature to range from cold to hot. Somewhere in between these two we experience warm, lukewarm, freezing, draughty, sweltering etc. The fuzzy logicist will argue that experiences do not come in extremes - there are all these grey areas where our true experiences lie.

Truth is, it is the binary that helps us define the grey areas in life. The world can certainly be experienced in its full splendour - however, we find ourselves lacking the words to describe it, if all we have at our disposal was '1' vs '0', 'hot' vs 'cold', 'near' vs 'far'.

'How far?'

'How hot?'

So we invent words to fill the gaps (to speak of the 'in between' as a gap is misleading, but thats another discussion). We have words such as 'mildly', 'somewhat', 'extremely', 'very', things which in English we call adjectives. Very useful little toys these - speakers of English pepper their dialogues freely with such descriptives, and the world of language is enriched as a result.

But. But that does not detract from what I am trying to say - there are 2 sides to a coin. Learn to see that every experience (or issue, or encounter, or entity, or any other) has its dual. Always consider that there is another side to a story, where the presence of something is the absence of another, like day and night, heads and tails.

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Hmm, I've rambled again - I take escape in letting my thoughts go wherever the ideas flow. Sometimes what I think makes sense. Sometimes... well, the above gets ejected. Its a kind of pseudo-babble that we all think in our heads, but never actually say out.

You know, it is really easier if I just talk about my life. There is not much going on it though, so it should be fairly straightforward, if not boring, to put it down in a blog. It is, after all, a kind of diary. Haha, in time to come, this word -- diary -- is going to go the way of the dodo. Few people write in a diary nowadays - they just blog it. So much easier (and faster) for one to type one's thoughts out than to ponder the mundane over pen and paper.

Think about what lasts - thought, or paper. The blog is thought. It is nothing more than a stream of '1's and '0's, tacitly contained using electronic means in a machine. One day, it will go.

Also, nothing beats having handwriting - it is kind of unique, can be tacked to the writer (unlike a blog), and the sight of ink on paper is not replicable (how do you replicate the kind of freedom of form you can have with pen and paper?). Sure, there are your stylus and pad hardware. But even these distil into '1's and '0's, and no screen resolution ever has the same fluidity.

I am a low tech person at heart - what an irony it is that I now pen all my thoughts through blogs.