The Gray

She held up a volume of Hegel. "I'm writing about dialectics."
"Dialectics," I said. "Your mean like Scientology?"
She smiled. "No James," she said "That's Dianetics Dialectics is the philosophy of opposites."
I thought about this. "How do you make a philosophy out of opposites?"
"Well, you know how people are. They like t see things in black and white? Up or down, male or female?
She had my attention now "Uh-huh."
"Well, dialectics says that's all bullshit. That life is not about opposites, but about finding balance between all those extremes."
I tried to sound less interested than I actually was. "How do you do that?" I said. "Find balance, I mean."
"By paying attention," she said. "By trying to see how everything also contains its opposite." She took a drag on her cigarette. "Because if you live at the extremes, you go nuts. If you want to make any sense out of the world, you have to live in the gray."
"That sounds hard," I said.
"The hell yes it's hard, she said."people don't like the gray. It makes people uncomfortable." It occurred to me that there was something delightfully gray about Grace Finney herself, in fact, this gorgeous woman in tough-guy leather.

-Jennifer Finney Boylan I'm Looking Through You (page 123-124)