Julie Callen, Director of Partnerships
By Julie Callen
We live in a world where binary relationships are commonplace: black and white, day and night, good and evil, hot and cold, right and wrong, life or death, man and woman.
These seem simple enough, but it only takes a toddler to notice that the moon is sometimes about during the day. When that child is learning their colors, they’ll soon discover that box of crayons has not one, but two shades of gray. Suddenly, the world is more complicated.
The beauty of humanity is that we can think of the exceptions to the binary. We can see that the world is not simple and there are very few absolute binary relationships.
Cristineagoe at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Even Schrödinger concluded that the hypothetical cat had the potential to be both alive and dead inside the box. So in a world where even physics says, “Hang on a sec, this is going to blow your mind,’” we still find ourselves trying to make the world conform to the binary.
When you’re talking about crayons in a box, or whether the moon has any business being in the sky at 11 am, it doesn’t seem that harmful. But when you try to apply our imaginary binary world to people, it can get real harmful, real fast.
These binary relationships get tied together—day and night and man and woman. Men get aligned with the Sun and the day, and women with the moon and the night. Right gets aligned with good, left with evil. We become dependent on these associations using them to make the world easy.
I want to challenge you: pick two binary relationships you see in the world, and see how many “exceptions” you can find to that relationship. Let yourself think about the implications of letting that myth continue…who does that hurt? If the answer is “no one,” go back and try again.
Moving beyond the binary relationships that have been established lets you see all that humanity has to offer, the beauty in the messy, complex, non-binary relationships that make life so much more interesting and fun.
Having an open heart to the people in the world is the way we break the harmful binary myth. The world is not black and white, it is full of nuance, diversity, and beauty.