Why opposites attract
This time I’m not going to start from the beginning. I’ll just start with the conclusion and then work my way back to how I came to this realisation.
Drawing made by my friend Tine Visser
So... Why do opposites attract?
Because they are very much the same thing.
And I know at first that doesn’t make sense at all, but hopefully once you’ve finished reading this you’ll see what I mean. And understand why every opposite is actually not an opposite at all, we just give them that kind of correlation.
Okay so now back to about a month ago, when my boyfriend first told me this idea of opposites not actually being opposite at all. I didn’t quite understood what he meant at first but then one week later I was reading ‘de Jacht op het verloren slaap’ (A wild sheep chase) by Haruki Murakami and he talked about how we can look at ourselves as
a leaf blowing in the wind and everything that crosses our path is just a mere coincidence
everything that happens to us, happens for a reason. And from the beginning of time it was already decided that these things were going to happen to us.
But whether you believe in the ‘leaf’ theory or the ‘karma’ theory doesn’t actually make a difference. Because all we have is now, stuck between ‘everything’ behind us and ‘nothing’ in front of us.
And that was the first time my boyfriend’s comment made sense to me.
Then I tried to explain all this to a dear friend of mine but I wasn’t quite sure how to explain it to her because I hadn’t fully grasped the idea myself. And so obviously she thought I was just talking nonsense. And it wasn’t until earlier today when I thought of a metaphor that would finally give me some clarity into how opposites work.
So this is my last attempt at trying to make this all look very logical:
‘Imagine a hill. Any hill. And then imagine someone standing at the bottom and someone else standing at the top. The person at the bottom will say that this hill is going upward, and the person at the top will say that this hill is going downward. Those are two opposites but no matter how you describe the hill, it still just remains the same thing. Opposites are all a matter of perspective but it doesn’t actually change anything about the world itself. In the world we live in, opposites don’t exist.’
Enjoy your day!