Blog #5: The Coin of Life
I’ve always looked at life as if it were a coin. On one side, you have the joys and pleasures of life. On the other side, you have difficulty and pain. Yes, very broadly put, I know, but bear with me. I, at one point, believed that life would only be as it is if you were to focus completely on one of the sides. You focus on the light of it, and you grow optimistic; you focus on the darkness of it, and you grow pessimistic. Many, many people believe that, but just as many don’t go into the depth of it. Why? It’s too overwhelming, too uncomfortably stimulating for their mind. I didn’t, and I wanted to talk about what I found.
Upfront, it looks to be as simple as that. You either make your life joyful or sad and full of regret. I thought about it like that for some years, but what I learnt during those years is that life, in its raw, unpredictable self, is never one or the other completely. It just isn’t. It’s a written law created by Mother Nature, Father Time, and their child, Fate. Life is constantly happening, whether we are living it or surviving it. Uncle Iroh’s quote from The Last Airbender goes something like this, “Life happens wherever you are.” When I rewatched the show (It’s a great show even for adults, okay?), the quote touched a spot on my mind. I looked and reflected on my thoughts. It made me think: Is the point to hold the coin of Life in such a way that only one side of it is shown, or is the coin meant to be constantly spun? The latter stuck with me, but now I was confused. So confused that I just laughed out of sheer discomfort cause I had no idea what the hell it meant. It tickled my heart. So I had a reflection of it and came to the conclusion: Let’s see how life goes when it’s constantly spun. The reason why I chose to approach life with this ideology, if you will, is because, like the coin being spun and you not knowing what side it’s going to land on, life is just as unpredictable with a 50/50 chance of either something ‘good’ or something ‘bad’ happening.
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The approach to life with that philosophy was… disastrous. There’s no other way of putting it. It was disastrous, I say. I don’t even know what I was thinking when I said to myself, “Hey, this might be a good idea!” So you could say the coin stopped spinning, and the face that showed was the adversity; the ‘bad’ side. I could have sulked about it (which I did for a short time) for the rest of my life, and just take it as it is, or I could have done something else. What else? Well, here I go.
The most ignored ability of the human body is its adaptability. Many, many, many people ignore that their body, and everything in the body, is meant to endure some hardships, and what is in the body? the mind. The mind’s greatest ability is also its adaptability. The catch of this, and why I believe it is ignored, is that the body does not like change. It does not like doing something new, so it urges itself and its user not to change at all. It’s some sort of an elusive prank by the biology of our nature. It essentially said, “Here. Here are the tools to build what you want, but to make it fun, I’m going to heavily imply the burden of building it so that you don’t even want to try.” Seriously, life. What the hell? Why?
This realization of mine is something that is not unknown, in fact it is quite common. Many people knew this before me, many people know it at the same time as me, and many people will know it long after me. The question I’m asking is, “What does this have to do with the coin?” The mind’s adaptability makes you realize things that you didn’t the first time you tried something. That makes you create different approaches to find answers. So I looked at the coin again. Are there two sides? NO! There are three. The face of light, the face of darkness, and the rim of the coin. For a long time, I’ve looked at this coin, and I realized something: the coin never moved. Sure, it spun, but it never moved from that spot. I focused on the face, and it didn’t move. My life did not move. Something happened to me here. I realized that life will happen, but it’s up to you to decide whether it’ll move. The approach that I now take is such that I stay on the rim of the coin, exposing both sides and moving it forward. Yes, both sides are exposed, and it is vital to expose both of them. Why? It is good to be optimistic and view everything in its goodness, but it is also important to be real to yourself and accept and prepare for reality and the challenges that await it, all while moving the coin forward, while moving your life forward. This is not surviving. This is living. It’s moving. It is being.
Take your coin. Don’t let face something. Don’t spin it and hope. Place it upright, expose both sides proudly, and move forward.
