When You Change the Way You Look at Things, the Things You Look at Change

Thinking Queerly: 52-Weeks of Critical Reflections On Liberating Humanity, Week 3.

What Do You See in the Darkness?

It is senseless to argue that light is better than dark.
It makes no sense because we cannot understand the one without the other.
Light and dark are understood as relating to each other.
Light and dark are nothing but descriptions that distinguish between the amount of light one can see and the quality of no sight.
Grey is the middle-ground, the luminous void between light and dark.
Even with your eyes closed in the pitch darkness of night, have you noticed that you can still see?
Open your eyes, now, and see, even in the blinding darkness of light.

Episode Notes

• How do you look beyond what you believe to be true, fixed, or finite?
• Sometimes what we see is not what we see.
• We most often understand polarities from extreme ends. I propose we shift our focus and look to the middle ground.
• Recall what I talked about in Thinking Queerly, Week 1, “Divisiveness Is an Illusion on Either Side of Balance,” what is the single point of origin, the middle-ground, the gap in-between both sides of the argument, polarity, or binary.
• Within gender identities, the middle-ground is humanity.
• In something more complex like a debate or an argument, there is no way that both sides could have a logical argument in which side understood each other if they weren’t in fact coming from the same middle ground!
• Just because you think you know how things are, how do you know for certain? What are you seeing which is proof of what you are seeing that is factual and provable in reality?

As Wayne Dyer says in his translation and contemplation of the Tao Te Ching, “Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life,”

“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change!”

Practice Today’s Queer Contemplation

I invite you to think back to a time in your life when everything changed. Perhaps it wasn’t such a big event, or maybe it was a life-altering dark night of the soul, or an epiphany when everything changed.

• What did you feel like?
• What did you experience exactly?
• What precisely changed for you?
• After the fact, how did you look at the world differently?