The Two Faces

Look around yourself, and you'll see the world filled up with poles - opposite poles. You'll see the sky and the earth, you'll see the high and the low, and you'll see the rich and the poor... Wherever you'll glance, you'll see opposites - someone is tall, while someone is short; someone is fair, while someone else is dark... And you very well know why I'm pointing these things out. Our world is made up of poles - the positive and the negative, we say. And in a way, everything has two sides, everything has two faces...

Every coin has two sides - you can simply not have a coin with just one face. Even the Roman God Janus has two faces - he literally has two faces. You may read the name and discard it as 'never heard before', but there is something interesting about him. In Roman Mythology, Janus is the god of transitions. He is the god of gates, of doorways and passages. His two faces look into the past and the future. And he actually symbolises what I am writing about here - poles.

To transit from one phase to another, you need to walk through a doorway - and Janus is the one who stands at this doorway. Every door has a speciality. And I'm not talking about the color,  although 'Asian Paints' may easily make this as their tagline. I'm talking about the symbolism. At every door, one path ends and another begins. Every door is a symbol of beginning and end. When new doors in the form of new opportunities enter our lives, we transit through those doors - we end something and begin something new. And because Janus stands at the doors between almost everything, that's why when a year ends in the our calender and a new year begins, Janus makes the transition - yes, the month of January is named after this god of the beginnings and the endings...

We leave our past and enter the present, which was once our future. And that's how we make our transitions. We enter and we leave. We come and we go. We get born and we die.

But that is not all.

I am always so intrigued by 'duality'. But the mere presence of two entities cannot sustain this universe. When two entities of a similar nature add, they strengthen the effect. But when two entities of opposite nature add, they balance the effect. And harmony can only be achieved by two, opposite forces. Without the poor, there would be no rich people. Without days, there would be no nights. Without summers, there would be no winters. If everything in this world were singular, this world wouldn't have lasted even a day. If there were no nights, we would have viewed the world as consisting of only days. And we would have lived by it forever. Every day, when we wake up in the morning, we see the sun rise, we get a pleasant feeling. Imagine if this sun were never to set. We would miss the nights in ways we cannot even begin to imagine.

Because everyone likes change. No one likes a stable life. While all we try to do in life is 'settle down', we can't live our lives without change. That explains why some people, despite being loyal to the core, have extra-marital affairs - because they are fed up of a monotonous life; because they want 'change'. And then, soon enough, their one life would end and another one would begin. (Yeah, I didn't mean murder.) 

Enough about change. When we in general, think about 'two faces', we don't normally talk about change. We talk about 'actual' two faces. And again, as I said before - everyone has two faces. All humans have two faces - a person may shower praises full of candied words when he talks to his boss; but let him come out in the lobby, and he is no less than a werewolf  in broad daylight. And I am not blaming him, or anybody for that matter. This is human nature. We want to please people, because we are social animals. And because we may not find everyone pleasing, we try to behave differently in front of them. Take the case of a police officer. While a criminal might think he is a 'bad cop' - stern and strict; his friend would have a very different opinion of him. He might even think of him as an idiot. The same police officer, who is so firm and cold and detached in appearance, might be afraid of cockroaches. (Don't judge him, he is not real.)

And just like that, we all have two faces. But most importantly, we are all addicts.

We all have different addictions - some people are addicts in a more obvious way - they are addicted to smoking or to drugs; some people are addicted to caffeine; some are addicted to pornography. And we judge them openly. What we don't know is that we are addicts too, maybe to things less visible. And there are some addictions you wouldn't have even thought about, like an  addiction to one's breasts (not in case of men!), or an addiction to pull out hair from drains, or an addiction to talk to dolls, and many, many more. We may be addicted to the Internet (although being addicted to my blog will be considered positive behaviour), we may be addicted to Television, hell, we can even be addicted to pull out our hair, or scratch our skin. And then we judge others, while being in the same pool.

And you might be wondering why I am talking about addictions in a post about 'Two Faces'. But at this point, let me highlight an interesting piece of literature. You might have heard of 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' by R.L. Stevenson. I don't know how many people actually like the book, but there is something in this book that is worth thinking about. In this book, Stevenson says, "Man is not truly one, but truly two." 

We divide people into 'moral' and 'immoral'. But is it really just a simple division? Is a rapist as equally immoral as a murderer? On the lines of how we classify people, it sure seems that way... But you know it's not correct. Because even though both are immoral, their 'degrees' of immorality are different. (I will talk more about morality in a future post.)

No one on earth can say that they are completely moral, because no one actually is. Everyone has a moral side and an immoral side, a positive side and a negative side - and that is what I meant when I said that everyone has two faces. That is what Stevenson meant when he said that man is truly two.

Addictions change us. When we are addicted to something, we have basically split into two. There is one side of us, which tries to control us. But there is one side of us that drives us to the object of our addiction. This has been talked about for centuries now, you know, the angel and the devil in our minds... When we have an urge, we transform into someone else, we transform into the devil - we turn into Mr. Hyde. And we suppress our Dr. Jekyll, we suppress our angel. That's why addictions ruin us - Mr. Hyde tries to destroy Dr. Jekyll. One part of us tries to collapse the other. And we may be no less than vampires - they may be a little bit  more visual, but essentially, everyone of us is a creature who transforms into someone else. 

Like poles repel. Unlike attract. And that is no different in our lives. In astrology, opposite signs are said to form the best matches. Why? Simply because when opposites team up, they increase the power. One fills in the weaknesses of the other. Day brings light, while night brings darkness. Most of us often try to find partners which are similar to us in as many ways as possible. But people who are almost same will soon get bored of each other. But it doesn't mean that they should be completely opposite to each other. Club such people together, and they'll fight all day long... Opposite forces complete each other, and they must complete each other - then only can they achieve harmony. Matter cannot pair with darkness. (Weird, right? Exactly what I'm talking about). Matter pairs with antimatter, and light pairs with darkness. The only reason being that they complete each other.

And that's why everything is important; everyone is important. The wealthy would not be rich without the poor, the fair-complexioned wouldn't be fair without the dark-complexioned people, and moral wouldn't be moral without the immoral people. What we need to understand is that every one is essential. Nature is perfect in the way it is. And only by the complementary existence of opposites can we have things we wish to have - Balance. Harmony. Unison.