More Than Two Choices
With all the important issues with the world right now, I want to talk about one closer to home. My hair. Over the past few years, I have gone back and forth between long and short hairstyles. Whichever style I had at the time, didn’t feel like the right one. At one point I threw some blue into the mix to see if it would help. Nope. Then I finally figured it out. I didn’t want long hair or short hair, I wanted both!
How often do we feel we need to choose solely between one option and its opposite? We feel trapped in either-or options, feeling we can only choose to have long or short hair. It is hard for our little human brains to see that there are more than two answers to any questions. A whole chapter in my book was devoted to alternatives because I saw many of clients stuck in either-or thinking. “Either I stay in this less than satisfying relationship, or I’ll be alone forever.” We can only see the thing we don’t like, or its complete opposite which is also not preferable. “Either I stay in this demanding career, or I will be homeless.” Or we see the opposite as impossible. “Since I can’t win the lottery, I have stay in this horrible job.” Truth is there is always more than one option.
The other day I watched a favorite movie from the 80’s, A Fish Called Wanda. In it, Kevin Kline’s character after receiving instructions, always asks, “What is that middle thing again?” In the movie, it is a funny characteristic. In our lives though, it could be a tool. What if we consciously ask for a middle thing? I am not pro or con, I am in the middle. He is not good or bad, he is in the middle. There is not only option A or option B, there is option M (middle).
Much of the pain in the world today comes from being stuck in dualistic thinking. Dualistic is either-or, black-or-white, short-or-long thinking. With only two options, it is assumed that if you don’t believe one way, it automatically means you believe the exact opposite. It limits us to believing if you are not for us (or our candidate), you are against us. This limits people to being either good or bad. Assumptions are made and labels are placed. This close-mindedness is causing many of our problems. We are losing family members and friends because of this limitation to our thinking.
Non-Dualistic or non-binary thinking expands our options. We can then see people as more complex than just A or B. We can see a person as good in general, but maybe some of their actions are bad. Instead of placing them in the restrictive box of “bad,” we can explore their history and understand why they act like they do. Their actions may not be acceptable, but that does not make them inherently bad. Thinking non-dualistically broadens our options, understanding, and our compassion.
To me, nothing is binary. Nothing is black and white. The human eye can perceive more than 500 shades of gray. Nothing and no one is ever one-dimensional. Wouldn’t it be nice if we all expanded our minds to perceive at least a few shades between black and white?
This week, notice your thinking. Are you only seeing two sides of the coin, or can you see a third?
