Today I’ve been thinking about binaries/dualities and how they are deceitful.
When you think about the lungs, and breathing, one would think that there are just two states: exhaling and inhaling. But that’s not the case.
The lungs start out empty. As you inhale, they gradually grow and inflate, pushing out the organs around them and filling up more space in your chest, filling with more and more air until they reach capacity. When they reach capacity, you begin to exhale, and they shrink, moving back into their original place, allowing the organs around them to return to where they were.
Exhaling and inhaling aren’t binaries but two states of complete flux. The only time your lungs are not in flux are when they are totally empty or they are totally at capacity. But this is not sustainable. If you were to try to maintain one of these non-flux states, you would be suffocating. You would die.
Life is flux.
We are all constantly in motion, in flux along a spectrum, moving from one extreme of empty lungs, to the other extreme of full lungs, but never stopping at any point, lest we die.
Even stillness has a motion. A still lake has fish swimming, breathing, eating, pooping, there are microorganisms doing their things, plants absorbing light and carbon dioxide to expel oxygen, and use the carbon to grow bigger, even the photons are bouncing and dispersing. Even the rocks are changing, the water is eroding them, and the ions of their minerals are degrading turning into something else. The atomic particles in each and every bit of this are changing, recombining, shedding electrons, gaining electrons, etc.
Binaries/dualities are a smoke screen to disguise the actual complexities and gradients of the flux of life.