Sometimes it’s good to keep things simple. To refrain from overanalyzing, sorting though, figuring out, staying in the gray between extremes or opposites.
Hot/Cold.
Good/Bad.
In/Out.
Soft/Hard.
Open/Closed.
Love/ ?
[What’s the opposite of love? Perhaps I’ve just stumbled on a topic for another day.]
Anyway, in everyday life, there is likely to be no absolute in these terms, and most of our time is spent in the middle. From childhood on, we work with kids, teenagers, and adults to understand and live in the complexity of life. To avoid polarities. No situation or person is all good or all bad. No one is all right or all wrong. There is a multicultural, deconstructionist framework to be applied to every person, every situation, every emotion and every thought. And once we can understand this complexity, we can figure out what to do in a given situation, and this is the path to healthy choices. This is the sign of advanced, mature functioning.
There are times, however, when I prefer a Sesame Street kind of simplicity. The show has become a present-day global, multimedia, educational force, but previously, before the plasticene era (which I love the sound of, but don’t really know what this term means, so forgive me for using it without knowing what I’m conveying), it focused on the simplest learning tasks for toddlers and preschoolers, teaching them fundamental building blocks that would later serve as the basis from which kids would have to form complex and mixed thinking.
Sesame Street used to teach word opposites, just like my list. And as I got older, way older, I learned that they also did these in Spanish. They’d use a sing-song melody, words flashing in large white font, set against a primary color square, divided into four rectangles. First in English, then in Spanish. The voices would repeat, the white words would shimmer and shake when they were called out.
For some reason, Abrido/Cerrado has stayed with me all these years. I’m pretty sure it means open/closed, but even if it doesn’t translate exactly, that’s what’s in my memory. I’ve used it more times than I should probably admit, with friends, colleagues, even students or people at work. It’s a quick and useful metaphor to cue people to stay emotionally open, when the urge is to close. People seem to recognize intuitively that they have such an opening/closing process, even if they’ve never thought of it in that way before. We’re a lot like poppies, which open and close daily, turning to the sun and then closing down for the night to protect our precious pollen. Nyctinasty, it’s called, this process of closing at the onset of darkness.
The other day, I was driving home, reciting “abrido/cerrado” like a mantra, over and over. I was anticipating some bad news, and could feel the darkness of my worry. “Can I stay open for 30 minutes?” I asked myself. “I don’t know,” my overly emotional self replied. “Let’s see.”
I used every bit of Sesame Street coaching to keep me in check. I did OK, staying open and receiving the news, and moving quickly to an analysis of the complex ways in which it was neither all good nor all bad, the strengths and possibilities inherent as well as the meaning for possible losses. By the end, I had sorted it out, felt a variety of emotions, and concluded that indeed the situation was not that great, but was certainly livable, and the essentials of life in my known universe would go on.
Sometimes life shows up like the twinkling magic of Hogwarts’ dining hall, and sometimes like the darkness of the Forever Forest, instead. I stayed open in the face of darkness, then rallied my higher level forces to figure out what to do with the shadows and gloom. This might be how we’re all supposed to do it, to stay open enough to create light and goodness in the face of what seems initially like a Dark Lord’s wrath.
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