YIN: S’up Buttercup?

YANG: Omg…life sucks! Can’t sleep, never enough money, underappreciated, and nobody ‘gets’ me. And then, there’s the crap thrown at me by other people. It’s never ending! 

YIN: Well, you know that you alone choose how you handle what is ‘thrown’ at you, what you do with the crap…yours or theirs.

YANG: Not another ‘glass half full’ lecture, I hope.

YIN: Ok then. If you can somehow think outside your boxed in mind, there’s a conversation to be had. If not…well…can’t help. You expect to be miserable, therefore you are miserable.

YANG: I can’t change now. Too old. And I don’t have the time. It’s not that easy. You don’t understand, my mind has a mind of its own and I can’t stop thinking those crazy thoughts. It’s too hard. And besides, I’m used to thinking this way. It feels like me. I see what’s real. You see…what do you see?

YIN: I see you spending a lot of energy just complaining. How ‘bout finding a solution instead? Not another self-help article, or worse yet, a book with all those words (insert a chortle here), but a slight little adjustment in how you think. 

The fictional author of my novel, The INNER WORLD of Celia Rose Dinwiddie Pritchard, poses a query:

YANG: Here it comes. It’s all about you and that damn novel…

YIN: Anyhoo…she asks herself a question: what is actually ‘real’? Is reality what we see, feel, and touch? Have all of us magically agreed that certain norms are acceptable or not? Or do we create our personal world entirely with imagination? The answer to both questions is…yes. 

YANG: Do you ever have a straight answer to any given question? How could you possibly understand everything that has happened to everyone in the world? And who cares, anyway. I’m concerned with me – my struggles, my challenges, my pain. If I spend my time thinking about the injustice forced upon me by my country, or God forbid, the world, I’ll go crazy! I can’t do one thing about any of that. Is yelling the only way to be heard? Well, I can get loud. Who can possibly understand how hard my life is. And tell me, why should I listen to you?

YIN: Why listen to me? Because I’ve been there, done that, lived to tell the tales, and made it my business to find out the purpose of every good and bad event. After being on this planet 70+ trips around the sun, I have figured out that it’s all about the trip, not the destination.

YANG: I’m very tired of the trip then.

YIN: I get it. I literally crashed and burned years ago after falling off a merry-go-round life that had the best, most exciting, wonderfully unbelievable things happen, and very honestly, times of pure hell. Some hell was of my own making and some seemed to exist simply because I existed. But what I now know is… everything that happened led me to the moment when I began to turn my life around. The big picture is often very difficult to see much less understand, and it’s easy to place blame on others. 

YANG: Don’t you ever want to hurt people who have hurt you?

YIN: Good heavens, I spent years railing against conventional medicine and a couple of bad marriages, but that got me exactly no where. When I started looking for solutions, small changes that I was capable of making and chose to make each day, good stuff started to happen. I began to change my perspective. And when I changed the way I viewed my life, my life changed.

YANG: What worked for you probably won’t work for me. It’s all a bunch of bulls*#t anyway. Another cure all that doesn’t cure anything.

YIN: Oh, I see. What has worked for me will never be accepted by thee. That’s sad. Anger, blame, and revenge are like self-consuming flesh-eating bacteria, the kind that infects every person within your sphere of influence – a pretty broad reach these days if you subscribe to the small but very loud minority of power grabbing cowards waiting to jump on the likeliest loud mouth bandwagon emerging from the murky depths of grifter hell. Yep, money and power speak. Oops…just a little rant. (Sorry about the run-on sentence though.)

YANG: Oh, so you’re one of ‘them.’ 

YIN: Maybe. From my perspective, so are you. But hey, time’s a wastin’ and battling against anything is a huge waste of time and energy. Go ahead and knock yourself out. Go on down the same road and stay miserable. And misery is all you will reap.

But here’s another idea. Maybe think about why you’re attached to a certain belief. Doesn’t matter if it’s about food, politics, what’s right or wrong, or if purple is a color or a state of mind. Is the belief a habit? A knee-jerk reaction from your tribe’s echo chamber? Are you holding onto a belief because it makes you feel more secure? Are you looking for someone to save you? Well, guess what…you can save yourself.

Most of the things that we’re afraid of are boogeymen of our own making. Fear begets fear. Like a snowball rolling downhill, getting bigger and bigger as it gains speed, fear makes us feel that we have no control. But each of us can gain control through our own thoughts. It takes practice, but it can be done. And therein lies peace. All the rest is only noise. Peace or noise? Which sounds better?

YANG: ???

YIN: Consider this – change only happens when you understand what to change in the first place. And whatever you believe becomes your reality. Change your beliefs, change your reality. So make your ‘thang’ yin and yang. Takes two to see the truth.