What Would LIfe Be WIthout Duality?

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Today is one of those days where my mind has been jumping around from topic to topic.

Then I came across a quote from Steph Curry in today’s Prompt A Day email — “If you don't fall, how are you going to know what getting up is like?” — I got to pondering that thought and this is what happened:
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Ever notice your life is never all one thing?**

You never fall down without getting up.
You don’t see light without seeing dark.
You can’t spend money without making money.
You never only laugh without crying at some point.
You don’t get angry without feeling happiness at some point.
You never walk up a hill without walking down it.

Can you imagine life in one direction only? I can’t. Just trying to leaves me feeling like it would be an unending pit.

We have a tendency sometimes to see people in one light and forget to see their other aspects. This becomes very noticeable when we have negative feelings toward a person. We see the negative parts and that is who the person becomes. We nurse that anger and use it as a wall to keep them away, to avoid seeing them as anything but negative.

It can also go the other way. Thus the term “love is blind”. When we care about a person enough we just can’t see their faults. The upside of that blindness is totally accepting the person without condition. The downside to the blindness is sometimes coming face to face with their duality is more of a shock than can be handled.

**Without the dark and the light in life, life would lack balance. Not just in our relationships but in our experiences in life. **

Children who rarely hear the word ‘no’ in their formative years find themselves in a for a rude awakening when the world starts delivering a lot of NO. They are unprepared for how to manage disappointment.

It can also go the other way and a child who didn’t experience being told yes and receiving encouragement to succeed will often end up just expecting to lose out on life.

I remember my eldest brother observing one of my sisters constantly indulging her boys. Finally one day he asked her “how will those boys know what good days are if they never experience a bad day?”

I laughed when he said it, then later as I thought about it, I started to understand his point a bit more.

We really do need the duality to even be aware of which part of the duality we’re experiencing. If all our days are good days, how do we know they are good? What do we have to compare them against?

If you went for a walk and the ground was only level, how would you even know what a hill was or even what difference to the walk it would make?

If we always stood on our two feet (literally and metaphorically) and never fell down, how would we know what it was like to get back up?

How can we know what a success is if we’ve never had to struggle through defeat and roadblocks to success?

We truly need duality in life.

When we’re struggling through the dark sides of life, we need that just as much as we need to find the light sides.

When we’re in the darkness, often the only thing keeping us going is the idea of ‘going to the light’. It’s the promise of the load being light and life easier in the light that draws us to it.

Yet, somehow we never think when life is going pretty good how we need some dark times to remind us how good life is. We just enjoy it and never want it to end.

You know, maybe the pessimist who is always expecting the other shoe to drop during the good times kind of has it right. The pessimist is acutely aware of the presence of the duality and is expecting it to happen at some point.

Something to think about eh?

NOTE: Header image from Pixabay.com

ALSO-- it's day 23 of the HiveBuzz Challenge I'm on track, how about you?

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Shadowspub is a writer from Ontario, Canada. She writes on a variety of subjects as she pursues her passion for learning. She also writes on other platforms and enjoys creating books you use like journals, notebooks, coloring books etc.

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She created Prompt A Day to share with others. You can subscribe to Prompt A Day to get started.



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awesome.. thank you ... just one more of those badges.. plus one day and you'll be sending me that sweet Monthly Author one :)

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Yeah, do it! 😄 You are welcome @shadowspub, that's with pleasure! We wish you a happy buzzy week 😊👍🐝

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very apt! Even a coin has two sides. Talking about pessimism, people are quick to judge when one chooses not to be sentimental about certain things , they see it as being pessimistic . In as much as positivity is the goal one cannot afford to neglect what’s on the other side .

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a bit of healthy pessimism can be a great motivator to move forward. Too much of it can be debilitating. The trick is finding balance, just like too much optimism can make one blind to obstacles approaching.

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Relating your idea of duality to my marriage and the way I raised my kids. I think you're right that its possible when someone loves a person, he cannot see the other person's faults that are obvious in everyone's eye. What puzzles me is that I still love the person, but the only thing I remember now are those painful days, which makes me put a wall between us to protect myself. Same thing with the way I raised my sons. I love them too much. During their younger years, I think they never experienced the difficulties we experienced when we were young. The setback is, now that they are grown up, there are times that I feel disrespected as a father in many ways, which makes me distanced myself from them. It appears that in my desire to give them a good life when they were young, I ended up failing to prepare them to face the hard realities of life.

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the bond of love, especially for your offspring, is almost impossible to break. Learning to accept the good and the bad can go a long way. I don't know that children need to experience the difficulties parents experienced but they do need to know there are boundaries and limits on behaviour. It's never an easy job setting them nor maintaining them. There's an instinct there to want to protect the ones you love from hurt of any kind but sometimes we have to refrain from rescuing them and let them work their way through situations.

It's difficult to move past walls once they go up. Tearing them down has to come from both sides and will rarely happen at the same time. That means someone has to take the first step and take the chance of rejection of the effort. I've often found my next challenge is to avoid judgment and recrimination as part of putting the past in the past. It's never easy and it takes two to tango.

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That's where I fall short. I know that that as a parent we should not be over-protective of our children, but it's not easy to put it in practice.

As for my marriage, it started simple but became complicated through the years. I am thinking that perhaps my response to the problem was wrong. I was even owning her mistake and was willing to accept her despite of what she did. But through the years of trying to win her back, everything I received is nothing but rejection. I am still human. After 12 years, my strength to bear pain has reached its limit. Now that we are both getting older, I am seeing some changes, but I feel that I have no more strength to do the things that I once did. I am now thinking that perhaps there are marriages like this. All I can do is to accept it and go on living for the sake of our kids.

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Awesome. I enjoyed this so much, I just read this to my family.

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I can't wait to read this sincere and thoughtful post, it seems to me that it is totally true, I am always aware of the dual possibilities of life, perhaps it is not being pessimistic but rather preventive, everything is a balance as I say, however there are to be aware of the control of emotions to know the possible actions that the present future holds for us, thank you very much for sharing what you think.

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thank you .. life surely is a struggle of balances isn't it? We rarely get them right most of the time. Sometimes we don't even know for sure what is right.

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Now that you've explained it, thinking more about it duality is kinda important in life cos life would be really boring if everything were one-sided

This post was nicely written and is insightful.

Very nice

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