being and binary

Living is hard.

It asks of us to walk blindly into chaos, create routine from it and take the storms as we know they will come on the chin. The art of living is a self help topic sold like no other, with countless books to help you be present, change habits, understand psychological conditioning and come back to centre, ground down, step in and step up. The ideas themselves seem simple enough but they still operate on our basic human binary.

Is this right or wrong? Is it, or is it not?

Science is a brilliant example of binary thinking, particularly when you look at a taxonomy or phylogenetic tree. When something is classified, it is based on two questions. Is it A? And if not, is it B? This keeps going, branching and balancing out until we finalise ourselves a defined solution. Does it have wings or hollow bones? Or does it lay eggs or have live birth? Does it have mammary glands or does it secrete poison? Yes or no. One or zero. This category or not. It’s all so very neat, definitely wrapped and tied down, surely, the simplest way to understand.

But when applied to living a modern human adult life, the right and wrong of it depends on more questions than answers. You have to keep asking, varying, tweaking, contextualising before you can answer yourself if this behaviour, course of action, choice, value is the right one. Even then, if someone flips the coin, the building blocks come crashing down and you’re left in the rubble of hope because we cannot hold onto ourselves as both a one or a zero. Perhaps this is why society has seen a rise in centrist politics or gender fluidity as a rebellion to this.

Either way, once challenged as a zero, we rebuild, stockpile the useable pieces, take out loans from our closest, add new philosophical questions to arm our taxonomy tree, we keep going and try to make routine out of chaos.

there is no right or wrong in a black hole

and with this, abyss can look like bliss to the beholder.