Deniz Sabuncuoğlu
We are taught at a young age that life is unreliable. From the earliest years of our lives, we are made to adapt to an unstable state of being. Constantly changing, always evolving. Never standing still or making a pause. Changing opinions, growing minds. Always learning but still yearning for more. The deepest desire to see all, know all. And above all, the belief that we can achieve all.
Life’s full of contradictions; we hear everyone say. “Every opinion is valid, but mine’s the one that’s right.” “Respect all but those who disagree.” “Be yourself as long as the version of you that you choose matches the ideal on the dot.” But how do you find your place, the correct space, the ever-so-difficult place between the blurred lines of life? How do you decide what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s true and what’s false? How do you choose when the mere existence of life is one big contradiction? Some time later, as you grow older, your mind grows stronger. You go from having many questions and very few answers to even more questions and too many answers. Every question carries weight, every answer carries expectation. What will you do? Which will you choose? Can you choose? It’s a black hole, a bottomless pit, an endless pool of opinions, questions, answers and contradictions. Contradictions….
They lie in the middle like the core that powers it all. Shapeless, formless, changing and evolving. Creating more questions with every answer, making the exception of every fact, a wrong for every right, a true for each false. Somehow all remain true but none are real, all work but they never settle. They’re contradictions. They contradict themselves, growing dualities inside dualities, making more and more until the lines between question and answer gets blurry. Because the more you learn the less you know, the less you know the more you yearn, the more you yearn the more you learn and the more you learn the less you know. And the never-ending cycle continues. It continues, growing as humanity does, only getting stronger. It’s messy, chaotic but somehow very orderly. Like a pattern you can never spot, like a word that rests on the tip of your tongue but just won’t come out. It forces you to unlearn everything you know, only to make you learn new things just to have to unlearn them again.
There are two sides to each coin. A scale that’s never quite balanced but getting there, closer and closer until it tips off again, because let’s be real, humanity has never been stable. And maybe we’ll see all once the balance is restored, but that’s impossible because we will always need more. Order needs chaos, light needs dark, sanity needs a bit of insanity and vice versa will always apply until it doesn’t. Because the contradictions still apply.