Most of us are eager for our kids to be happy. We focus on creating happiness in them, guide them toward adult paths we believe will lead to happiness, and give them pep talks (or employ other antidotes) when they’re down so that they may return as quickly as possible to a state of happiness.
All of which makes sense – it’s the only approach to life most of us know. In fact, obsessing about our happiness is more or less central to everything we do, think, and aspire to. Heck, the pursuit of happiness is even codified in the Declaration of Independence.
It’s also a terribly misguided approach to life and I suspect a key reason we’re seeing record numbers of miserable, anxious, and even suicidal kids. The more we attempt to protect our children, soften life’s blows, and otherwise bubblewrap existence, the more our kids are left reeling by their opposites.
About those opposites. We exist in a dualistic universe. This is not a spiritual concept or New Age thinking – it’s fact. You cannot have hot without cold, up without down, happiness without unhappiness. Or as Lao Tzu wrote in the Tao Te Ching, beauty exists only because there is ugliness, light requires dark, life depends on death, and so on.
Yet we ignore this most fundamental of truths, and in the process create unrealistic expectations for ourselves and our kids, thereby setting up generation after generation for a fruitless quest for a lasting happiness that cannot exist.
Duality is a powerful gift – if we choose to truly embrace it – because it instructs us that the pursuit of happiness is a fool’s errand. Mind you, there’s nothing wrong with chasing happiness. Just be prepared for a proportionate share of unhappiness. And if an existence spent ping-ponging between these two poles is your thing, more power to you.
Consider anything that brings you happiness. You’ve landed a relationship with the most desirable person you can imagine. What joy, what happiness! All of life seems new, fresh, exciting!
But in short order comes the jealousy, or perhaps a nagging sense someone even more desirable is still out there, or the discovery that your dream lover is an asshole to waiters, or the simple and inevitable dulling of that relationship over time.
It’s why the mystics so often spoke of love and hate being two sides of the same coin. How often have you witnessed – or perhaps been party to – a passionately ‘loving’ relationship that turned equally passionate in its mutual loathing?
If you know any of those eternally sunny, optimistic types, you’ve no doubt also discovered how hard they work to keep their stormier thoughts out of sight. They get moody when you’re not looking, or disappear for long stretches, or suffer strange medical conditions.
You can’t pretend away life’s unhappiness and misery, no matter how hard you lie to yourself and others. Duality is an immutable law and no one escapes from it. And duality brings with it many gifts, including:
- Duality urges us to consider the whole, to embrace the Oneness of existence, to recognize and appreciate that the thorns of a rose are no less important than its flowers. Consider the weeds – the dandelions and clover – that we for so long have assiduously plucked and poisoned from our lawns. Today we know that these ‘weeds’ are critical to honeybees, whose ongoing collapse threatens the global food system on which all of us depend.
- Duality teaches us that hardship, suffering, anxiety, etc., are mere mental labels, and that their opposite can be expected. The burn of a hardworking muscle leads to a stronger body; the agony of a broken relationship makes way for new discoveries of others or oneself; and even that ultimate supposed downer, death, makes way for new forms of life.
- Duality reminds us that what we really aspire to is peace – a capacity for equanimity regardless of whether we are experiencing good times or bad.
- Duality tells us we’re a part of something so much larger than ourselves, an incomprehensibly vast intelligence of which we are both part and whole, One without a second. It informs us that all the labeling and judging is merely the mind’s way of making sense of ourselves and the world, but that it is not, in fact the truth. For whatever the mind tells us has, again, its opposite, waiting in the wings, and both are to be embraced and seen for what they are.
