“presence and absence give birth to each other”
one thing i liked about reading the dao de jing is the opposites. i mean i knew that coming in, all the yin-yang stuff, but there’s something i liked about the particular way it’s executed
for example,
Because beauty is acknowledged by all as beautiful, ugliness springs into being.
Because goodness is recognized by all as good, evil has meaning.
Presence and absence give birth to each other; difficult and easy complete each other; long and short complement each other; high and low fulfill each other; sound and syllable harmonize each other; before and after order each other; always.— first half of chapter 2 of ken liu’s translation of the dao de jing
contrast this with “evil must exist otherwise good would have no meaning”, “every cloud has a silver lining”
i remember when my therapist told me about glimmers, things that cue you into feelings of joy and safety, to be contrasted with triggers, which cue you into the opposite. people can have a hard time seeing and appreciating these cues, and one way to help with that is to practise finding them, for example by keeping a gratitude journal
this worked for me but only up to a point. when noticing a cue, i would feel the joy in it but i would also see the pain. here’s a sunset, and i think about all the incarcerated people who have been denied that experience. i enjoy learning something new, and i think about being a child in a system where learning was made into a competition and used to gatekeep safety. if i am praised as “smart”, what happens to the people who aren’t? what happens if i lose that due to disability and ageing? if i should “remember that i’m an adult now” to self-soothe, what was i supposed to do when i was a child? what are children who are suffering now supposed to do?
this, understandably, was a huge source of stress for me. and more so when people tell you either “ignore it” or “actually that’s a good thing”. i don’t know how to turn that part of me off (and do i want to? i’m not sure that the part of me that sees the pain is all that separate from the part of me that sees the joy). and i definitely don’t want to believe that it’s actually a good thing that people are suffering[1]!!
what a relief to read something else! to know someone else has seen what i have seen!
of course, there’s still the problem of my difficulty in managing the emotions that follow, in finding a balance between my joy and my grief and my anger. but that’s much easier now that i worry less that i’m “doing something wrong” by noticing that bright things can have a dark side in the same way that dark things can have a bright side.
footnotes
i know that the word suffering is sort of overloaded and can be interpreted to mean anything from the worst pain imaginable to, like, having to wait for plants to grow before you can harvest. i mean something closer to the former ↩︎