Complex Numbers

When does loss become gain?

One of my great revelations in life was when it came to me that those things we call "creation" and "destruction" are not antonyms; that, in point of fact, they are one and the same thing. Certainly I'd heard this expressed before, but it's one thing to hear somebody say it in relation to some form of mysticism, and another to have its reality punch you in the gut. They're not just "two sides of the same coin," I realized; they ARE the coin, yin and yang, two heads, two tails.

So much of our worldview is dictated by language. Did what we call "intelligence" in humans predate the development of language, or was it the other way around? Or, alternatively, was it all part of the same evolutionary development? In any event, we insist on calling this event a "creation" and that other event a "destruction." But I can't imagine an instance of creation that does not also involve destruction. If I write on a piece of paper, creating a poem, I destroy the configuration of the paper and whatever I use to write it. If I got my hands on high explosives and blew something up, I would create a mess (and light, heat, noise, and legal trouble). Even if I only create something in my mind - an idea, or whatever - it destroys whatever neural configuration was there before (or however memory works).

Whether we call some event a creation or a destruction is a matter of the value we place on whatever is being created or destroyed.

Today has just been one of those days when my mind refuses to stop dwelling on the past, on all that I've lost along the way. But can I apply the semantic gymnastics above to the loss/gain relationship? Can we really lose or gain anything without gaining or losing something else? I suppose it's all in how you look at it. "Loss" has negative connotations - except, maybe, when it comes to losing weight. "Gain" has positive connotations, but certainly it's possible to gain something undesirable, like a tumor or, somewhat less malignantly, a traffic citation.

Can it really be all in how we look at things? Certainly there are absolutes, but so much of our experience is polarized through this half-empty vs. half-full filter. The optimists have been telling me this all along, but I don't listen to optimists; I don't trust anyone who smiles all the time.