Azure Wings Café

What is happiness? Some would say it is the absence of sadness. What is goodness? Some would say it is the absence of evil. What is darkness? Some would say it is the absence of light.

Some would say that we define the things in our lives by their opposites. You cannot have a concept of happiness if everybody in the world is happy. If everyone would be happy, then the need to define a term that is the opposite of sadness would no longer be existent, as well as the need to define sadness itself. We cannot become something without becoming nothing. In order for us to know goodness, we must first know evilness.

This is the paradoxical nature of life. We can't be happy if we were not sad, and we can't be sad if we were not happy. Life would not be life without its flaws. Without these flaws, nobody would say that 'life is good' and we would be living in a literally monotonous world where the opposite forces that make it turn do not exist. Simply put, life would not have meaning if we there is no light. But the same can be said when there is no darkness.

That being said, why then is this paradox flawed? We answer it by answering the following questions. Is cold the absence of heat? or is black the absence of white? Some would argue that the answers to those questions would be yes, and would use physics to explain such. But that is not the case when we look at human life. Not all men are physicists.

To a lot of people, cold is simply something that describes what they feel when they do not feel hot. But even in the ordinary sense, this is also not true. Why? Let's define another term, and let that term be 'warm'. Warm is neither hot nor cold. It is a feeling that's comfortable while neither of the extremes are. The existence of warm defeats now the definition of hot as 'not being cold' and vice versa. The existence of an inbetween factor shows how the definitions by opposite is flawed.

So the not not true paradox is really not not not true. What does this imply? Recall in the above post that without one of the opposites, life would be meaningless. When we began to show the flaw to that reasoning, its outcomes are also consequently flawed. This means that when life loses sadness, or happiness, or both, it does not become meaningless. When we see ourselves as directionless beings living lives simply waiting for dying deaths, when we think that we are dull beings who are too numb to make drastic differences to this world, we never really become meaningless. For as long as there is life itself, not the good or the bad life, there will always be meaning in it, and it is our task to find that meaning and not give on searching for it.