PUSHING AND PULLING

The Other Half of Everything

Push open a door and something moves away from us.

Pull it back and it returns.

Two opposite actions. Or so they seem.

We divide the world this way almost without noticing. Up and down. Light and dark. Expansion and contraction. Positive and negative. Beginning and end.

Even breathing follows the pattern.

In. Out.

One seems to undo the other.

But perhaps that is the wrong way to look at it.

A breath cannot consist only of breathing in. A heartbeat cannot only contract. A wave cannot have a crest without a trough.

Remove one half and the other begins to lose its meaning.

The ancient Chinese symbol of yin and yang expresses something similar. What appear to be opposites are not necessarily enemies. Each helps define the other, and together they form something neither could create alone.

Perhaps we make the same mistake with ourselves.

We divide experience into success and failure, pleasure and pain, gaining and losing, then spend enormous energy trying to keep one half while escaping the other.

But what if some of the things we call opposites are really movements within a single process?

The tide comes in because it also goes out.

Day appears because night follows.

Life itself seems to move through countless rhythms of arrival and departure.

Perhaps pushing and pulling are not two forces fighting over the universe.

Perhaps they are the universe universing ­ — not a thing, but an activity?

And perhaps what we call the other side of things was never really other at all.