Duality

I know it, you I know it. Everyone has already seen this symbol. You might not know its name for sure, but it is everywhere. On that hippie t-shirt your weird tree-hugger cousin wears, tattooed on a yoga practicing friend´s arm or hanging from the neck of some esoteric old aunt.

We see it so much we don´t even notice it anymore. So take a good look at it now.

It is divided in two halves, can you see? Two equal parts, two different colours and, on each one of the two halves, a dot of the opposite colour. Balance, harmony, easy to grasp, right? But if that was all about it, wouldn´t the two accurately equal halves be enough?

Everything, absolutely everything in the world as we know it, is duality. Everything exists as a counterpart for something else, whatever it is. So simple I don´t have to exemplify. I´m sure you thought about night and day, winter and summer, courage and fear, and so on. Opposites? Look again.

In the middle of winter, there´s something buried deep in the frozen earth, which is not yet green, not yet plant. But it is promise. If you lived where it snows and dug a hole, you´d see it. There´s summer in the middle of winter.

At five in the morning it´s pitch black night. At five thirty east turns into a bluish radiance, not yet sun but already light. If you woke up so early, you´d see it. There´s day in the middle of the night.

I am not, you are not, nobody is simply one and only thing. We are duality, parts, pieces and still whole. It is this completeness that allows us to be full of self confidence in the morning and cry our eyes out by nightfall, be faithful and optimistic at breakfast time and want to throw ourselves from a bridge by noon, wake up brave and strong and beg for help as soon as it gets dark.
Shadow and light, shadow and light and never one thing or the other.

So observe the symbol once again. Yes, that one you saw a hundred times before. Think of it as if it were you. See how you are?

You, me, all of us, are wholeness. So cry when you feel like it not forgetting you´re strong. Laugh but remember you can be sadness. Be afraid whenever it´s needed but keep in mind you´re the one who said it, made it, did it. Fight if you have to but don´t forget you’re sweet.

By the way, the symbol is known as YinYang. It is the perfect translation of the Tao, the dynamic and dual energy that Is - and pervades - Everything.