Branching Out: The days are long, the world is big, and we all fall down

I've been thinking a lot about opposites lately.

Spoken word poet Sarah Kay (whose interview and TED talk I referenced in my last post), has a writing exercise that she uses called "Things I Know to Be True". Her students are instructed to think of three things they know to be true, and whether it's a personal truth, a scientific truth, or a historical truth, Kay says that when these "truths" are shared in a group, invariably at least one of four things happen:

1) Two people discover they have written down the exact same or similar truth.

2) Two people discover they have written down the exact opposite truth.

3) Someone has written down a truth that no one else has ever heard of.

4) Someone has written down a truth that everyone thought they knew about, but never considered from this angle before.

While I think these are all potentially fascinating points of connection and conversation, I'm primarily interested right now in #2, holding in consideration the precise opposite of what I think is true. I can't count how many times this came up in my last relationship, where at times it seemed that Carl and I were on completely different sides of different coins, minted on different planets. This conundrum of opposing viewpoints often brought us to a conversational standstill, and even more often lead to a fight, but I'm left wondering about what we left hanging in the balance. Could we have learned better to consider the paradox, be humored by it, appreciate our differences? Could we soften to it, be transformed by it?

I could rehash my relationship over these questions ad nauseum, but one can play this game too. How often do we flip our own perspective on its head, try to believe something we thought impossible, voluntarily invite certainty to slip away? Martha Beck touches on the power of paradox in her book, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World:

By seeing that the things we believe to be true may also be false, we force the verbal brain to relinquish its obsessive belief that it knows the “right way,” or “how things should be.” This throws us out of our preconceptions and into pure perception and observation, into a state of open-mindedness.

This week, as I was driving up to my hike at the Sam's Point Preserve, my GPS routed me to a destination that was quite obviously not the trailhead, but a residential dead-end. Of course, the first thought that came to me was "KJ, you are lost." But in the spirit of opposite-think, I tried this statement on for size, "KJ, you are exactly where you need to be." And somehow, that suddenly seemed true too. I laughed at myself, turned my car toward my intended destination, and gave it another try (many thanks to my hiking buddy this week for patience and navigation assistance).

We arrived a little later than planned, but enjoyed a beautiful day at the Preserve, hiking a 10-mile loop through a Ferngully-like landscape, through narrow ice caves, to the top of Verkeerder Kills Falls, and to the rocky outcrop High Point, from which we could see a massive stretch of the Shawangunk Ridge, the Catskills, and the Hudson Valley. Unfortunately, my pictures of the hike just don't do the place justice, so I have little to share visually, but all the more reason for you to go and check this hike out on your own. There are enchanting surprises at every turn.