Polarities

Monday October 7th, 2024

As much as we'd like it otherwise, life is never static. Everything is in movement. Impermanence rules. Yet it isn't random chaos either. There is an underlying dynamic, Polarity.

Life, my life, your life, turns on the tension generated between opposites. Neither possible without the other. Favouring one over the other, often causes us to become stuck in a relentless undermining of self. Making progress only to fall back to where we always were.

Lately, I've been thinking of the polarity of inner and outer.

I've always backed myself to engage energetically with the outer world. Confident in my ability to work with change and ambiguity, navigating relationships, working around constraints with the imagination to find new possibilities. I've felt capable, out there. I've tended to overlook my inner world, until recently. It's been a mistake to think that I can achieve what I want, without considering who I might need to become to do so.

I've enjoyed for most of my life a strong streak of independence. Now I find independence limiting. Comfortable, but holding me back. It feels like a good time to examine my relationship with some of my inner polarities.

Much that I'd like to achieve now in the world, calls for me to free myself from some of the limitations of how I see and think of myself. Having perhaps to let go of some of the positions that got me here. Success may not be possible, without an intention to work on myself. In particular, these inner polarities seem to call for a deeper personal re-evaluation:

• strength and vulnerability - I'm not sure that I've had a healthy relationship with either

• rigor and flexibility - I have a clear favourite here

• imagination and concrete reality - again I've a clear favourite.

As I write this, I'm certain that new balancing is a long overdue opportunity to renew myself for the future that calls me. And the thing with polarities is that it isn't about finding a new point of balance in my life. Rather it's about developing my capacity to be able to hold both ends of the polarity while responding to the immediacies of the world as it presents itself to me. To be able to be always finding the right balance, moment to moment. Like a dancer perhaps.

I'll write something more, on each as I begin to explore these potent inner relationships.