Opposites Attract

We are spending the week at Lake Powell in Page, AZ. It is a manmade lake created by damning up a river and flooding the canyons that are located in the middle of a desert. It’s so big it took 13 years to fill! This is a picturesque place with tall, red sandstone walls filled with water bordered by blue skies, and brown sand. It’s a water paradise in the middle of the desert. As I sit and stare at the lake taking in the beauty around me I can’t help but think about my friend who took family vacations here as a child. She raved about her time here. They rented a houseboat and she spent the summer jumping off the back and going down the slide into the water from the upper deck of the boat, waterskiing, swimming, tubing, exploring, and living a seemingly idyllic lifestyle for the week. But, then I have other knowledge about the lake through another friend. Her friend, a young man in his late twenties, a newlywed, an active, strong guy, died here while on vacation with friends. How can one place build such beautiful visions for one person and such horrifying memories for another? It is just an example of the oxymorons in life.

Have you ever noticed that the beautiful things in nature can also harm you? Roses smell sweet and look gorgeous but have thorns. A sunny day is bright and cheery and may uplift your spirits but it can also burn your skin if you stay out in it too long. The clichés about how the good comes with the bad are true. Someone or something wants us to appreciate the beauty while we can because there is always a flip side that can appear at any moment. The Yin and Yang are all around us. The phrase “it’s better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all” illustrates the impossibility of having any positive feelings for something and expecting to escape the negative ones. Happiness is often paired with sadness. In health there can be illness. The end of life is death.

These paradoxes in nature should have been obvious to me by this stage of my life, but they did not really resonate with me until now. I guess I had to live this long to experience enough situations to convince me to truly appreciate the good while it lasts. It is easy for others to tell us to appreciate what we have in life, but it is another and much more powerful notion to come to the realization yourself. Look around your world. Do you see how full it is of the delicately balanced opposites? Recognizing their alter-egos and trying to imagine yourself in the negative situation instead of the positive one will help to drive home the point that you should never take the good for granted.