Life is best lived at the meeting of shadow and light

Concepts for Conscious Living

Life is best lived at the meeting of shadow and light.

This quote is one I wrote to go with a picture that is part of our free screensaver. The picture is of a piece of forest, of moss and light and shadows. The play of light and shadow gives the picture depth and dimensionality. Here's the picture:

(Go to http://www.phoenixcentre.com/screensaver/index.htm to see the rest of the screensaver.)

As any artist knows, (even if the extent of your artistry was a class you took in grade school) the way we achieve "three dimensionality" on a two dimensional surface is to create the illusion of depth through the interplay of shadow and light. The point? Well, a painting featuring nothing but light would be a white canvas; a picture displaying nothing but darkness would be a black canvas. I'm sure the National Gallery in Ottawa would be glad to pay a couple of million for either (Canadian joke -- the gallery bought a red canvas for several million a couple of years ago . . . ), but I suspect looking at either for more than a minute would lead to boredom.

Black and white thinking, on the other hand,
seems to be quite popular.

You know the drill. The way I see it is true. All other versions are false. I'm right, you're wrong. Your beliefs are immoral, I'm the pillar of morality.

I wrote a story about black and white thinking in my book, Stories From the Sea of Life which goes like this:

I had a brief couple of counselling sessions with a young woman, while I was counselling at the University. She was mostly concerned with her sex life, which was not turning out as she had planned.

We discussed it at length, because there was no depth. She was in her first year, and she wanted to be in an adult relationship, and be loved. So, she had been picking up men in campus bars. She'd see a guy, think he was cute, start a conversation and end up in his bed. Or hers. The few men that hung around past morning rapidly lost interest in her, or started cheating on her. In bars.

We discussed the possibility that men in bars, on average, were not there looking for the woman they were going to marry. They were looking for a one night stand. She thought she should be able to change their mind. She agreed, after a bit, that maybe context and location was important. After all, you don't buy lumber at plumbing stores.

By the next session, she reported she'd managed two weeks without going to a bar. This, she thought, was good, but had certainly diminished her chances for a relationship. So, she had joined the campus Liberal Party. She had gone to a rally. She had bumped into a guy who was cute. They talked, had a sandwich. They went back to the rally. He stood behind her. His hands wandered into her clothes. She thought, "I've found true love!" She took him to her room. They had sex. He left in the morning.

I asked her why she'd consented to sex on the first date, with a stranger. She replied, "Because I'm a Liberal." I said, "Pardon me???!!!" She said, "If you're a Liberal and someone asks you for sex, you have to say yes. You obviously don't understand." End of therapy.

This particular young woman only came for therapy three times, as she was annoyed that I couldn't see that she had no choice. If a man wanted to have sex with her, she had to say yes. When having sex with guys she picked up in bars caused her pain, rather than examining the core belief, she joined a political party and invented a rule that "Liberals always have sex when asked."

A subtle move, this. She went from personal choice to an inflexible rule to a party mandate. By doing this, she frees herself (subconsciously) from responsibility for her actions.  Her personal responsibility for her sexual acting out was nil. (During the bar days, it was also nil, because she declared that the booze she consumed caused her to have sex.)

Now, as we look at this story, you can't help but notice how one dimensional it is. This is what happens, always, when we have a rule that allows for absolutely no variance. 

The rules in a black and white universe are simple;
they just don't work. 

Which, of course, causes black and white thinkers to blame others for the failure, as in our story above.

Black and white thinking is a characteristic of people younger than 12 or so. You tell kids the following story: "A man's children are starving so he steals some potatoes to feed them." Then you ask them if what he did was right or wrong. Almost universally, young kids will condemn the man for stealing. Teens, on the other hand, will note the extenuating circumstances and say something like, "Stealing is wrong, but in this case he was trying to keep his kids alive, which is a good thing."

Being able to see shades of grey is one mark of being an adult. For many, though, it's a bit more difficult when it's personal. When we take things personally, we lock into one way of seeing things, situations, people, groups. Until we notice that such rigidity always leads to disappointment.

This is not a prescription for no beliefs. Nor is it a call to do whatever feels good. What I'm suggesting here is that, when confronted with a seemingly insurmountable obstacle, or the same results over and over (see last week's article), the wise person begins to look for other ways of acting and thinking.

In the end, spending your life waiting for others to change so you don't have to is a prescription for waiting forever. The life well lived has three dimensions. It is alive, vital and vibrant. It begins with a palate of colour wider than one or two. It begins, it deepens, and it finds its depth at the interplay of darkness and light. In the grey. In the tones and hues and varieties. In flexibility and in balance.

This week, look at the tone of your life. The blacks, whites, grays. See how often you can broaden the palate.