Making sense of existence.
Hello my dearest Doodle Soupsters,
What is the opposite of love?
Is it hate, or indifference? Or something else?
Sometimes, I imagine polarities as the ends of a bracelet. Lay it flat and open - they’re opposites. Put the bracelet on and the ends sit together, side by side, separate and yet as close as opposite ends can be.
Maybe love is one end of the bracelet and hate is the other end. Maybe indifference is the center, furthest from hate and furthest from love. Maybe not.
I don’t know.
All I know is the more I think about opposites, the less they seem like opposites. It’s not that they’re not opposites. It just feels so complicated and …
What is light? Does it illuminate surroundings so we can see? What about when the sun gets in your eyes? Light can be blinding.
What is darkness? With a small amount of light, we can see in the dark. With a large amount of light, the scene is transformed. We may be able to see “more” yet we can no longer see the darkness.
Think of a moonlit kiss. What is a moonlit kiss with a giant spotlight on a pair of lovers? It becomes something less intimate. Something less like a moonlit kiss.
I used to stuff away my darkness. Squished it like a bulky sweater into a purse, zipper bound to break, enclosure bound to burst. My depths are too expansive, too boundless, too beautiful to stay hidden.
I’ve written about my hesitance to accept duality for what it is, even as I kept on letting myself be drawn toward it. Co-existing opposites. Intertwined polarities. I wrote about how I wanted it to be a good thing. And I wrote about how I knew it’s neither bad nor good.
Yet, maybe this assessment of duality obscures an important truth. Maybe saying duality is neither bad nor good makes it sound like something indifferent. Like a void. Like something empty.
And in a sense, it could be. Yet if duality is nothing, it’s also everything. If living means nothing, it also means everything.
How do these sentences make any sense at all?
How could living mean everything and nothing?
Maybe, it’s true and my human brain just can’t grasp it fully. Yet it’s also possible that it’s my language. I need to describe this another way.
There’s the saying, “Opposites attract.” Think magnets. The feeling of two opposites, one in each hand. The strength of that magnetic force. Something feels so magical about that pull. The feeling of two things being drawn to each other.
I’ve asked it before and I’ll ask it again:
What is light without darkness?
What is darkness without light?
What is life without death?
What is death without life?
And more questions that are kind of all the same question and kind of not:
What is beauty without pain?
What is pain without beauty?
What is struggle without ease?
What is ease without struggle?
What does it mean to exist?
What is peace in a world without war?
What is war in a world without peace?
What is peace without acceptance?
What is peace without justice?
What is justice without peace?
What is together without separation?
What does it mean to make ends meet?
What does it mean to love this existence?
What does it mean to love possibility, knowing possibility allows for creation and destruction and everything in between?
What does it mean to be human?
What does it mean to be animal?
How does our humanity shape what it means to exist and experience life?
What does it feel like to be a cat or a dog or a frog or a wolf or a tiger or a fish? What is their existence like?
What is language?
What is wordless language?
What is communication?
When these words go from my mind to the page, how do they change? How will they shift and transform as you read them and they enter your brain and hopefully your heart too?
What is life?
What is life?
I have so many questions. I’ve always had so many questions. Why? Why? Why?
How? How? How?
And why does it always seem the truest answers are I don’t know and there are no answers, only questions?
Maybe, I thought if I found one, even just one answer, my curiosity could rest. Maybe, then, I could be “normal.” Maybe, then I could feel understood.
Yet now, when I feel understood, it’s often something wordless or a feeling, an intuition, behind the words. Read between the lines. Look into their eyes. How else could you tell what dwells within? It must be some portal to get a glimpse into something underneath, some window into.
I could continue this train of thought, but then again, this train could go on forever, couldn’t it? Wouldn’t it?
So I’ll pause here.
I’ll feel the air molecules around my nose and lips.
I’ll breathe in, and out. In again. Feel the oxygen in my lungs. Blow out carbon dioxide. A simple gas exchange, an ordinary alchemy, a perpetual process of transformation essential to living.
I’ll sign my name and I’ll walk real slow.
With curiosity and wonder,
Nicole Sylvia Javorsky