Opposites & Conflict (AKA: God has a Sense of Humor)
Maybe I had too much time on my hands one day, but I started to think about the fact that there are opposites of everything. There is tall and short, for example, positive and negative, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, strong and weak, rich and poor, man and woman, matter and anti-matter. If you think about it, you find opposites of everything in the universe.
When this idea of opposites took hold of me (maybe I had low blood sugar that day), I did some research and realized that the concept of opposites has been around for a long time. Chinese Taoism philosophy, for example, talks about natural dualities (such as male and female, light and dark, high and low, hot and cold, water and fire, life and death, and so on) as physical manifestations of the yin-yang concept. The yin-yang concept describes how seemingly opposite or contrary forces are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world and how they give rise to each other.
Since I was on a roll that day, I decided to dig a little deeper. What was the purpose of opposites, I asked myself. I couldn’t find any clear answer; the only thing I could think of was that God did it to create conflict. Opposites create conflict. Maybe the plan – if there was a plan – was to keep us humans on our toes. Conflict creates tension and, since we don’t like tension, we get on our toes in an effort to resolve it.
I don’t know if you believe in God, or a Supreme Being, or some Organizing Force – or whatever, but I try to keep that complex concept as simple as possible and just call it God. So if God exists – which I believe is true – it seems to me that God has a sense of humor. That’s the only way I can explain it.
Another reason to suspect that God has a sense of humor is that He made sure that we didn’t know the answers to a lot of these questions, like why must there be conflict and why do we have a desire to resolve it? Why not just accept conflict and live with it? Why, for that matter, do we have to live at all — with or without conflict? Why anything? Why is there a universe? What is the meaning of life?
Since those questions have been around from the time our ancestors came down from trees and started to walk upright, I lowered my expectations. I began to look at what I DID know. I know, for example, that everybody likes a story. Whenever I tell a story, people seem to listen.
I also learned that, in order to keep people’s attention, it has to have conflict. I don’t know why except that maybe it’s because it gets the listeners involved. Maybe the listeners of a story like to feel, vicariously, at least, that they are participating in the resolution of the conflict. It seems to be in our genes.
I don’t know which came first: conflict, or the desire to resolve it. It’s somewhat like the chicken and the egg dilemma. But the next time I tell a story, I’m going to make sure it has conflict. It seems to give God a chuckle.
© 2016 Tony Mankus