The binary of extremes
Are we attracted to chaos and drama OR is it a coded transmission from an earlier experience that has led to how to think, feel, and act?
Every story has a protagonist and an antagonist. We want the story to have a climax and then fall into a resolution. We want the peaceful resolve and the beautiful ending.
Isn’t that our addiction to rom-com and hallmark versions of great movies like An Officer and a Gentleman, Pretty Woman, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, and The Proposal? We welcome good endings and love stories.
We also like the constant dichotomy of contrast. No one really longs for the liminal space of uncertainty, the unknown, the quiet, and the peaceful. We project in a pretend world that we want that because it looks far greater on us to say, “Oh I want peace.”
I lounged in bed longer today than normal and watched how my mind and body desperately tried to activate a problem. Problems are minimal chaos. Give me something to solve - I am really good at solving and I often come up with multiple ways to resolve the conflict.
Here’s some insidious truth. I picked a fight with my husband the other day. As the words began falling out of my mouth, I could feel my body ramp up to my wild warrior. I am not proud of this and, at the time, it was a bit unconscious. It took me days to confront how I was tangled up in an internal drive to create an escapade of sorts. Even our conversation at the time had both of us confused.
Our brain searches for the resolution in the crafty and foolish mockery of subtle messes. Often we contemplate the roughness and the delusional love story in the movies that end in loss, like One Day and Titanic.
I am not much of an explorer when it comes to adventuring into the wilderness. That natural environment scares me. I find peace sitting in nature, just not moving in nature. We are more often than not great at observing and watching what happens around us. Being able to move in the subtle nuance of peace and flow is really what we are running from.
I believe that is why I am willing to journey into the world of film and stage much more readily. It feels a bit more safe to navigate. For me, as I sit and watch a movie or a drama unfold on the screen or even in a book, I get to feel the experience with less intensity. This is almost like a math lesson. My internal dialogue holds the conversation as I slowly allow this binary experience to unravel organically outside of me. Think of it has building a muscle, yet instead of holding the weight and folding your arms in repetition, your imagination gets to do the heavy lifting.
Being so highly sensitive, the experience of movie watching is far more expansive.
I grew up in chaos and drama. My parents fought over what my dad wanted to do and what my mother wanted as our image. He was physically there at times until I was 17 years old. I really don’t remember him around much. She was always creating grandiose moments partly because that is when he would show up and partly because she loved the attention of being in the spotlight. I was raised in this binary element of extremes.
My body feels safe and comfortable when I am in some form of drama, real or unreal. I have found myself lately crying at my need for the aliveness of such extremes and how in the peaceful space of liminality, I begin to unravel and jump around anxiously.
The truth is extremism gets attention and people notice. We are not trained in the subtle shifts of a binary function. The in-between is often assumed to be boring and monotonous. That’s why doing nothing frightens so many. Letting the resolution come to you in a dream or as you are walking is so unencumbering. The liminal space has become our battlefield.
The binary function of the extremes is the gift. Everything is a reflection of what is coming face to face.
“Everyone around you and everything that they do is a gift to you, allowing you to know and re-define yourself. You are the cause of your world.” -D.C. Gikandi
Your internal navigation system has an expression that becomes activated as you seek some form of redemption. We are a species of balance and harmony. Our physiology welcomes homeostasis so it is always seeking that calm place.
The explorer seeks a wayward landscape. Something within us – an inner wisdom – knows that the extremes of such contrast are not balanced. The exacerbated and flamed-up drama has only been coded into your way of doing from earlier experiences. Your mind thinks this is the truth of what you need to survive. And that is the delusion.
Rumi’s famous quote, “What you seek is seeking you.” feels a bit outward and a theory that can explain how we are confronted by the very essence of who we are.
Like attracts like. A universal magnetism draws us to the exact aspect of who we are and how we believe, think, feel, and act.
And if our programming has been featured in the dichotomy of chaos and drama on the stage of life, there is a high likelihood that you are attracting the very landscape you run from.
The explorer wants to be a free spirit with little care in the world of options. She chooses by way of a chemical mechanism that drives the need to be on the go and not be held down. Her choices might very well be governed by an unconscious reality that she lives freely bound to nothing, yet in actuality, she is bound to an unseen force of disturbance that mimics the stress of earlier times.
The explorer wants what she wants. She seeks with a mission and finds her peace in the movement of navigating uncharted experiences. The thrill as her blood bubbles from turning here, riding this wave, and wildly in the extreme of joy. The explorer feels withdrawl when the thrill has ended. The every day holds no merit to the highs of being in the wild. She believes the wild is where she comes alive. It is really where she goes to escape from being seen. The vulnerability of her inside scream for help and security activates her decision to explore the unknown wild of nature or new experience.
The soul seeks adventure in the neutrality of neither leaning in or running from. An adventure opens the way for her to fully accept surrender to what is. The adventurer receives the outcome as a gift – a true recollection of a serene moment orchestrated by a divinely guided need to experience. Everything is a result. The adventurer arrives at a beautiful landscape as that is where she arrived. She does not think about how she got there or why she got there. She trusts with an inner principle – I am here because I am here.
She sees an auspicious peering animal along the mountainside as that is what she sees. She knows seeing that animal in that exact moment happens because that is where she is. There is an energetic exchange that happens in each of her adventures. She is neither pushed or pulled. She is simply aligned to what is within her and accepts fully all that is offered to her, while in return she offers the exact to anyone and anything that shows up. She seeks no fighting or battle in the everyday therefore no fighting or battle shows up.
Her adventure is her life in the everyday moments and situations with those she loves dearly and with those who show up along her path. She welcomes authentically it all as she knows there is something for her in each conversation, adventure, person, etc. There is no binary separation.
The explorer seeks to prove her worth in the uncharted experience of the extreme.
The adventurer receives the optimism of uncharted experiences by noticing the extremes and relishing in the newness of what comes after.
We are neither. We are both. The real showing up in the liminal space of the unknown is that everyday life is unknown to some extent.
2 questions have been guiding me lately in these liminal spaces and noticing the binary of extremes:
Am I rooted here?
What is here for me? for the other?
After a couple of days of contemplating why I picked a fight (and only after I had to sit with the aversion I had to this display of torment for both of us), I realized how rooted I am in the extreme. If I make something a problem, I can easily solve it. This deep awareness of the truth about myself led me to understand I also had the agency to pause in the extreme, let the whirling around me happen, and say to myself, “Nothing is wrong here.” And that is how the muscle of my own self-agency begins to continually morph into form. I can extract from a moment or experience what I need and offer the same to another person or persons.
I don’t have it all figured out. There was a point when I thought I did. Here’s where I am today.
What’s here for you?