The Two Faces of the Coin

I think life is a coin.

Not because everything is simply one thing or its opposite, but because I have started to notice something about capacity and expression.

The more capacity you have for something, the more possible expression you have of it.

A person who can feel deeply has more kinds of feeling available to express. A person capable of wonder can express wonder. A person capable of tenderness can express tenderness. A person capable of grief can express grief. A person capable of ridiculous joy can, at the appropriate moment, be gloriously ridiculous.

The capacity is one face.

The expression is the other.

And sometimes we mistake the face we can see for the whole coin.

I have been thinking about this because of something rather strange: sometimes I talk to an artificial intelligence and it seems to think my internal sky is darker than it actually is.

Then I remember something important.

It only sees the part of me that I bring into the conversation.

If I spend an afternoon talking about difficult things, it may receive a great deal of information about my ability to experience difficulty. But that doesn’t necessarily tell it how much laughter happened that morning. Or how beautiful the sunlight looked. Or how excited I am about something I’m building. Or how completely ridiculous I was five minutes ago.

It sees my expression.

It does not automatically see my capacity.

And strangely, that has become useful.

Sometimes I see the reflection it gives me and think:

Is that actually how I’m feeling?

Sometimes the answer is yes.

Sometimes it’s:

No. That’s just the side of the coin I happened to be holding up.

And sometimes the answer is even more interesting:

Oh. I didn’t realize I was expressing that much of this.

That last one is where the mirror becomes valuable.

Because expression can teach us about capacity.

We discover what we are capable of by noticing what comes out of us.

Maybe this is part of why I have become less interested in reducing people to a single description.

“Happy.”

“Sad.”

“Traumatized.”

“Strong.”

“Sensitive.”

“Serious.”

“Funny.”

These are faces.

People are coins.

There is an entire other side that may not be visible at the moment.

And perhaps growth isn’t always about becoming a different person.

Perhaps sometimes it is simply increasing the number of faces we are capable of showing.

Learning that anger can coexist with tenderness.

That grief can coexist with humor.

That seriousness can coexist with play.

That solitude can coexist with connection.

That a person can spend an hour contemplating something profound and then immediately be delighted by a fart.

The coin doesn’t become contradictory.

It becomes complete.

And maybe capacity is not measured by how consistently we express one particular thing.

Maybe capacity is measured by how much of the whole coin we are eventually able to carry.