The Beauty of All Life: Being Real, Not Always Positive
In “A Life in the Day”, (The Magicians, Season 3 Episode 5), Quentin and Eliot are transported to the past in Fillory and spend 50 years together trying to solve the mosaic puzzle. According to the book, the solution to the puzzle is supposed to “represent the beauty of all life,” a very nebulous, objective, and ineffable goal. And then of course, it's only after spending that 50 years there, working on the puzzle, loving, arguing, grieving, remembering, trying again and again, all of that together is what leads to the iridescent tile that finally reveals the key.
At first watch, it may seem that the “beauty” they're representing is love – Quentin loved Arielle and Eliot, Eliot loved Quentin, and they all loved Teddy. It makes it seem as if the answer is having someone to love, or someone who loves you. But the episode is careful to show us more than the happy loving moments. We see the way they rely on each other, the tentativeness in that first kiss they share, Eliot's sorrow when Quentin begins seeing Arielle, Q's grief after her death, their tiny arguments when frustration overwhelms them, the countless permutations of the tiles as they keep trying to solve the puzzle. These things all taken together are the beauty of life.
Even Quentin's response to Jane, “With a friend. We solved it together.” shows the depth and layers of the mosaic's answer. Eliot is dead. Quentin only found that tile because he happened to dig in that spot to bury the man he'd lived with and loved for decades, but it was those decades themselves that solved the puzzle. They absolutely solved it together.
Especially with movies and TV, we tend to think of the best of life as our goal, which only adds to the current trend of toxic positivity and social media expectations, but those things aren't real. If we strive for and share and acknowledge only the good things in life, we're missing out, and also deluding ourselves. Social media expectations seem to want everything to be in the form of a cheesy 80's family sitcom (or its 2000-something reboot) where the focus is joy and smiles and good things and even when there is a problem it's fairly minor and seems to be resolved within a week in show time (one or maybe two episodes).
I've been getting a lot of messages lately about the dualities of good and bad, happy and sad, etc. and I'm noticing a theme. You can't have one without the other. It's not a new theme, by any means. I'm just noticing it a lot more. An entire season of The Legend of Korra is dedicated to the continuing conflict between Good and Evil (or Raava: the force of light and peace, and Vaatu: the force of darkness and chaos, as they are called in their spirit dragon forms in the series). “Since the beginning of time we have battled over the fate of this world, and for the past 10,000 years, I have kept darkness under control and the world in balance” (Book Two, Spirits: Chapter 7, Beginnings, Part 1)
Raava explains that she cannot exist without Vaatu, and even in the event one of them “wins,” the loser will not be truly defeated. “He cannot destroy light any more than I can destroy darkness. One cannot exist without the other. Even if I defeat Vaatu in this encounter, darkness will grow inside me until he emerges again. The same will hold true if Vaatu defeats me.” It's a cycle I'm familiar with in my life, and have been resisting this whole time. We all have good and bad things happen in our lives, joyful days and sorrowful days, periods where life runs smoothly and periods where everything seems to be full of obstacles and struggles. And if you're anything like me, you may feel like those harder times are somehow proof of wrong-doing or mistakes on your part.
Recognizing that it's just the perceived duality we've learned to expect is helpful for me. I think especially within Western cultures and Christian teachings, we learn to connect unhappy events with “bad people” and thereby often feel confused or upset when they happen to us, either feeling it's unfair, or believing we must be at fault somehow. In the Buffy episode Spiral (5.20) Ben says “I just know that sometimes terrible things happen to good people. It shouldn't, but it does. It's nobody's fault. That's just the way life is.” And the point here isn't about “good people” or “bad things” as much as it is that “things happen” and “That's just the way life is.” So I try to remember, to consciously remind myself (and in this case remind others as well) that bad things just happen, and so do good ones. And none of them happen in a vacuum because joy and sorrow, good and evil, pain and ecstasy, they're all extremes on a spectrum. And I don't mean a simple sliding scale from one extreme to the other, because they all overlap and tangle together as well, like a spider web of sliding scales that all affect each other.
So I was beginning to mull over these ideas about good and bad, these messages I'd gotten from The Magicians and The Legend of Korra, I thought about how we can't ever completely win over darkness or evil on any level. We'll never fully eradicate disease or get rid of conflict or end war. The Avatars in the 1996 Charmed created a world without conflict, but the only way to do so was to remove free will (i.e. removing people from the world completely when they caused conflict) and brainwashing everyone left to spout toxic positivity and be saccharine sweet. Needless to say, it was unacceptable and the Halliwell sisters demanded the Avatars return free will and free thought.
Turning this all inwards, those same duality-spectrums exist within us, and like the external struggles, they're here to stay. Those with PTSD or severe depression or other mental illnesses will never fully get rid of those things. As Buffy said once, “Strong is fighting, and it's every day.” (“Amends” 3.10) and she's so right. The intensity of our fight may change, and some days we may find little or no resistance, but that fight (against depression, against darkness, against racism and ableism and so many other oppressive ideas, against whatever we're fighting) it's ongoing. Always.
And when the fight is ongoing, there will absolutely be losses, but there will also be wins. It's so easy to get caught up in the losses, the struggles, the bad things that feel like they're chasing us down, targeting us for unknown reasons. I've been having a particularly rough time lately with family health scares, financial worries, expensive home repairs, big life transitions, personal health flare-ups, and lots of stress and over-stimulation. At times it has really felt like some universal critter was stacking things on my metaphorical head waiting for the jenga tower of my life to fall and bring me toppling down with it.
Then one day I found myself in my back yard, taking advantage of some late afternoon shade while lying in the hammock. I'd gone out there mostly to get away from the noise of home repairs inside; I was still feeling overwhelmed and wishing we'd found a home further from traffic, but trying to relax as much as I could. Suddenly I found myself hyper-aware of a brief lull in the traffic. There was no car noise, no barking dogs, no tile saw vibrating through the walls of the house. All I could hear was the light breeze through the trees and the birds chirping and fluttering nearby. It was just a couple minutes (maybe less) but it was so perfect and peaceful and refreshing that I was surprised by how those feelings could exist so closely surrounded by the negative ones.
Maybe the universe was trying to make sure I didn't miss the importance of that realization because then I kept getting these messages. John Denver's “All This Joy” has the lyrics “all this joy, all this sorrow, all this promise, all this pain, such is life, such is being, such is spirit, such is love” - one of my favorite of his songs, and the reminder of it playing during our church service was incredibly timely. It's all so much yin and yang kind of ideas and reminded me again of the “Facts of Life” theme song. Looking at this all together, it's like there are so many lessons all throughout life about how we can't have joy without sorrow or good without evil because that's just how reality works. There are even lessons about how these dualities aren't real and there's a bit of bad in all the good and a bit of good in all the bad (again with Raava and Vaatu's story, or the revelation in Buffy that some demons can be good and some humans can be bad), and yet we still try to stop the bad, will it away and hope for it to end. We still have little to no faith in the good, no faith it'll last, and still worry that things will never be good again.
It leads me to wonder if this is what the Buddhist Four Noble Truths is talking about. The first Truth is the idea of “life is suffering” and the Noble Truths lead to the Eightfold Path, which is the notion that we can stop suffering if we end our desire. (more info at this link, including background on Siddhartha and some great intro explanations: https://www.buddhistdoor.net/features/understanding-the-four-noble-truths-and-walking-the-noble-eightfold-path/) I think, in the most simplistic of terms, maybe they mean the desire for things to be joyful all the time. We know life has its ups and downs. Those of us living with mental illness or chronic physical illness know that we will have good days and bad days. Everyone knows there's no escape from sorrow no matter how fast or hard we chase joy. So accepting that, taking the good and the bad as the facts of life that they are, makes the bad easier to bare, and maybe that's what they mean by ending suffering? After all, Eliot and Quentin discovered “the beauty of all life” by living through the whole spectrum of human emotions and experiences, so why shouldn't we?
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