#160823: Thoughts on the Medium

I’ve been thinking about highs and lows lately — the natural oscillation that occurs over days, weeks, months, and years. It’s a pendulum that swings from side to side and makes up the very essence of what it means to be a sentient human being; an emotional person.

I’m no stranger to highs and lows. The slightest energetic shifts can sway my internal pendulum from one side to the other, though I’ve rarely, if ever, thought about the liminal space that exists between each side. The space between high and low. The medium, if you will.

Over dinner the other night, a friend brought up the concept of medium. The idea that most things in life hover in a middle-ground between high and low. It’s the notion that the glass need not be half full or half empty; it’s merely filled halfway between full and empty.

At first I saw this as a rather simple statement but then I closed my eyes for a minute the other night and wondered if I could ever accept being just medium — the willingness to be good-not-great and believe wholeheartedly that ‘good enough’ could be both good and enough. “Probably not,” I thought to myself as I walked the thin line between awake and dreaming. And I pictured myself as a child and asked when she learned that extraordinary was the only possibility for someone like her.

As I lied in bed that night I thought about my time in law school and the possibility that I relied on law school to achieve something beyond the medium only to realise that the experience itself was good enough and that was both good and enough. I recall thinking about how simple life must be for those who feel comfortable with the medium. They would say something like, “It’s not great, but it’s done,” and move on.

And I thought about the person who lives in fear of the medium—they put down anyone and everyone in their surrounding to feel a brief sense of superiority that quells the ego which longs to be seen as something more than medium.

And I thought about women and wondered if women could ever be just ‘good enough’. Could women ever just exist in the medium?