Are opposites opposite?

Yesterday I wrote about considering the opposite of something in order to be able to understand it... thinking about life to understand death, and vice versa. I also wrote about discovering a whole pile of writing and thoughts from a couple of years ago. So, without further ado, here is a little snippet of it:

Even the most pure things are not pure at all. There is always a darker aspect; a shadow, the streaks of dark pink in a white petal. For any given absolute, there is also an antithesis. Within love, life, beauty and light, there is also hatred, death, decay and darkness. We inevitably juxtapose the pure with the tainted. They cannot exist without the other; they can never be mutually exclusive. In order to know light, we must know dark, and in knowing this, we taint that which we know to be pure.

I'm pulling this out from the vault for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it illustrates the idea of considering opposites in trying to understand something. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, is shows that perceived opposites aren't always opposites at all.

We might think of life as being the opposite of death, but is this true? Perhaps at a biological level. But if you think of life as the act of living, the collective actions of people on this planet, then death and life are inextricably linked. Every action and choice we make has to do with our inevitable death.

Everyone knows that everyone dies. So we break up life into discrete chunks: school for the first 18 or so years, perhaps another few years at university. Marriage, children, mid-life crisis, retirement, grandchildren, death... everything from expected social norms to social security is structured around the fact that life is finite. Tainted, tinted. Life is coloured by the knowledge of death.

Surprises

Was going though old folders of work on my computer just before… a futile attempt to try and get rid of extraneous files and folders I don’t need. I stopped, however, when I came across a document that was called (most unhelpfully) ‘essay draft’. As things turned out, it was not an essay draft at all, but a compilation of thoughts and writing (spanning from 2007-2008) which I had pretty much forgotten all about.

More surprisingly, I found some of the stuff I’d written to be… OK. Not like when you read over stuff from a couple of years ago and wonder what the hell you were thinking.
The most surprising thing was that so much of it was about death. Not in a gruesome way, but more as a way of trying to understand life.

I started a blog post a couple of days ago (still in the drafts folder – don’t think I’ll bother posting it now), saying that the trouble with studying death is that you have to study life as well. I think that to be able to get a grasp on anything, you need to look at its opposite. Well, a couple of years ago, I was thinking about life but looking at death as a way of understanding it. Funny the way these things go. Despite the morbidity of much of the subject matter, so much of what I’d written is pertinent to the same thoughts and themes that I’m attempting to address now in this studio.

Over the next couple of days, I’m going to post some of this stuff, with my current thoughts alongside. Might be a good way of clearing thoughts up once and for all, but there might even be some therapeutic benefit to it too.