YING-YANG

One of the athletes I coach is a dude named Ryan Denner, as "seen" in the video below. He's a busy guy, always having somewhere else to be it seems. Despite this flaw, the ladies love him and he and I fully connect. You see, he is busy not simply to stay busy or to impress (the ladies) but to achieve some lofty goals in life. And yet, this still isn't the reason we connect.

We connect because he knows how to disconnect.


This disconnect is so hard for so many athletes, and so many people, to grasp. They cannot disconnect from society, from their training numbers, from electricity, from their preconceived notions, from Boulder, from themselves. But Denner gets it. He sees both the trees and the forest, not to mention everything else within the forest and all that surrounds it. A recluse cannot do this and nor can a societal slave. The societal slave knows only society and so in truth doesn't know it at all. You can't fully come to terms with something unless you know its antagonist, its counterbalance, it yang.


Yin/Yang
Good/Bad
Success/Failure
Black/White
Happy/Sad
Science/Faith
Peace/Chaos
Fast/Slow
Night/Day
Work/Play
Ryan/Ryan


When you see the world in only one way, you are blind. Most people are myopic and therefore completely blind. Religious types and Americans are especially afflicted, it seems. Ask another of the athletes I guide, Andrew Gowans from South Africa, what he thinks about this and I'm willing he too "gets it". He knows there is nothing to get, and you either get it or you don't.

The Yin/Yang symbol above represents this. It is basically the understanding of how things work. The outer circle is everything, while the black and white polliwog-looking creatures swimming around in the middle represent the interaction of two energies, the yin and the yang, the black and the white, the good and the bad, which essentially cause "everything" to happen. Of course, thanks to their "eyes", these polliwogs are not completely black or white, just as most everything in life isn't completely black or white. But even if they were they could not exist without one another. They need each other to strike a balance, just as you need air to breathe. Finally, the polliwogs would completely lose their meaning if they were both gray. There are two extremes to every story and the truth lies somewhere in the middle, in the gray. The gray might be darker or lighter but it is clearly gray. And of course if it were all gray, it would be black or it would be white and there'd be no balance.

We should all aim to be so fortunate and sagacious and balanced as Andrew and Ryan, to laugh at ourselves while taking ourselves seriously, to congratulate ourselves while berating ourselves, to work and play at the same instance, to live and yet know that at the very same moment we are dying. Get busy living and get busy dying. Because anyway, as it stands, from the second you are born, you're always doing a little both. Lean down the middle, and to both sides