There is an essential give and take, push and pull, up and down, to life that is both simple and yet a core mystery of existence. Every pair of opposing forces we experience are actually complementary forces designed to help us remember our wholeness. It is through this necessary dialectic of life that we develop character, form virtues, and gain integrity.
The inherent oppositions of life are designed to bring about growth, change, transformation, and evolution in life. They ultimately shift our focus from the familiar to the mysterious, from the physical to the spiritual, and from time to eternity.
Here we have a fundamental principle of life that presents us with endless pairs of opposites, creating contradictions, conflicts and problems, or muddles, to be resolved. Each pair of opposites adds up to a whole. Problems only arise when the whole is broken down into parts. In many traditions, the central problem of the human condition is how to reunite the two parts into their primal wholeness. Knowing that there is a balance to the creative and destructive energies of life is a guiding principle of human development.
There may have been times in your life when you were fully aware of a conflict of opposites going on, a push and a pull between two forces that seemed to have equal power. What kind of contradiction did this create for you? Did your consciousness of these opposing forces serve as a catalyst for growth for you? Did they help you to focus any more on your core spiritual values? How did you recreate a balance between these opposing forces, or resolve the muddle created by these opposing forces?
My life has been a sequence of such push-pull opposites and their value became much clearer when I took up sailing with my daughter (then only about 14 years old). We learned it was the equal and opposite forces of wind-on-sail and sea-on-keel that actually propelled the boat forward. The direction was up to us. All we needed to do was to steer by adjusting the attitude of our boat with respect to the pressures applied above and below. Sailing became a wonderful metaphor for navigating such life situations. I view the wind as spirit and and the sea as the world. You can drift with current, you can drift with wind. But to sail with direction takes strong spirit and a proper attitude.
Thanks for your thoughts, Darrell. Sailing really is a great metaphor with which to witness the beauty of this sacred pattern of transformation in our lives. I like the way you’ve described the nuances of sailing here to fit the processes of life.