While reading chandelle’s recent post and the comments that followed, I had occasion to think about my dualism, which I’ve discussed at length before. Many of the comments discuss the “spectrum of sexuality”, how there may be some people who are completely heterosexual or completely homosexual, but that most people likely fall somewhere in between (of course, leaning one way or the other).

Although this would probably not qualify as a strictly dualist view of sexuality, it is exactly what my dualism is. Day and night may be polar opposites of one another, but only at noon and midnight are they “fully” day and night. The obvious in between stages are twilights, when the one slowly fades into the other. But even pre-dusk has a different quality than dusk itself, and each moment since true noon is closer to midnight.

The symbol of duality that I’ve identified with for the longest time is the yin yang. For a while, I understood the two halves to be separate, but containing “the seed of their own destruction” or the seed of the other. More recently, I’ve thought of it more as a continuum—each blending slowly into the other, with many shades of grey between.

I still think of it, however, as a dualist world-view. Perhaps I’m simply wrong, but it’s still an either/or. A room is either light or dark—but in relation to where you just were. Coming into a lit lodge from the daylit snow, it is dark; coming into the same lodge at night, it is light. There are still two poles, they just depend on where you’re standing.