The Dot in the Dark

Look closely at the symbol and there are two things in it that are not halves. Inside the dark, a small circle of light. Inside the light, a small circle of dark. They are the part people forget when they draw it from memory, and the part that changes everything once you notice.

The dots are not ancient. The oldest drawings did without them. They came in with the swirling shape, and it was the dots, more than anything, that made people start to see two fish with eyes. But whatever they look like, their meaning has been steady for centuries: each half carries, in its heart, a seed of the other. There is no pure dark in the figure. There is no pure light. The design will not allow it.

Now think about your hardest recent week

Put the symbol down and think about a week this year that was mostly dark.

When a week is like that, the mistake we make is to look for the light to be half of it. It is not half. It is a dot. Small, round, whole, and sitting there in the middle of the dark whether or not you have found it yet.

Look back at that week and you will probably find it. The friend who kept texting even when you did not answer. The one hour of the day that was yours, the dog walk, the shower, the ten minutes in the car before you went inside. The thing you learned about yourself that you could not have learned when things were easy. At the time, none of it felt like much. It was not much. It was the seed of the next season, and it was already there.

In the dark, do not look for the light. Look for the dot.

The seed in the good season

The other dot is harder to love. In the bright half there is a small circle of dark, and the design puts it there on purpose. Your good season carries, from its first day, a little of what will end it. Not as a flaw to be fixed. As the way the figure is made.

You know this one too. The new relationship where, three weeks in, you catch yourself bracing for the ending. The job you love, and the small knot in your stomach on Sunday night anyway. The baby asleep on your chest, and the thought, out of nowhere, that one day this will be a memory. People spend enormous effort trying to paint over that dot. A perfect year with no shadow in it. A love with no grief folded inside it. The symbol is gentle about this, but firm. Take the dot out and it is no longer the symbol. It is just two colors.

So when the small dark thought shows up in the middle of a good day, you do not have to fight it. It is not a warning. It is the dot. You can nod at it and go back to the baby.

The old text has a line for this, from its second chapter: being and non-being give birth to each other. Not one after the other. Each from inside the other, like the dot.

A pair of small yin yang earrings set with black onyx and mother of pearl, each stone holding a dot of the other, is the version of the symbol I would choose to wear, because it keeps the dots.

Find one

Two practices, one for each half. In a hard week, find the dot. Not the silver lining, which is a thing we say to be polite, but the one small round whole thing that is actually there. Name it. That is enough. In a good week, keep one eye on the small dark circle, not with fear, but the way you keep an eye on the weather. It is part of the day. It does not get to ruin the day.

Above both halves, in the oldest drawing of all, sits something most people have never seen: the empty circle above it. This is one of a series of short essays on the yin yang. The rest are gathered here.

Somewhere a moon is up over a dark hill, small and complete, and the hill is not asking it to be the sun.