BINARY....

How do you communicate, class?

Communication is one of the most important tools in the arsenal of any living thing. Communication is all around us, in every action. Communication can be as obvious as literally asking a friend to bring something to you, or something as subtle as the twitch of an eyebrow in a tense showdown.

Communication is involuntary and embedded within all of us as human beings. We pick up the ability to communicate quicker than we pick up the ability to do almost anything else in our lives. I stand before you today, class, because I’m not half bad at communicating things to you in a way that you can understand.

The reason that communication is so brilliant is that it is so varied. Just think about it for a second: you go to your local DIY store because you’ve decided to paint your spare bedroom. You’ve decided to go for a nice shade of blue because the furnishings are blue.

Brilliant. Which blue?

It is simply a colour, but the variety of ways to describe just the colour blue is astounding, and it is part of the reason I love to teach. There is always so much to learn and so many new ways to learn it in.

But some people don’t live in this rich vibrant world we do, with thousands of shades of each colour. Some people live in a world full of dichotomy, where something is either one thing or the other.

Monty Straight has a severe problem with this. The human mind is so complex, but Straight thinks everyone boils down to two distinct doors. What they think they want, and what he knows they want.

So binary. So inane. Treating the human psyche like a light switch does not do the mind justice, and you certainly cannot reduce the hopes, fears, dreams and nightmares of a fully formed human to a straight choice between A and B. Between 0 and 1. Between Yes and No.

The only person who would do that is someone who had something to gain from it.

Or nothing to lose from it.

Which is why Rain lives in this binary world too. The dead and the living with nothing but a curtain between them, being marshalled by his hand. But even before he became the whisperer of the dead he lived a binary life too. Rain versus the world, the included versus the outcast. Something he plays up to even now.

The truth is, life is richer, class, when it is full of flavour. When you get right in and read between the lines and learn what life is really about. I’m a walking example of why dichotomies don’t work. There is always a middle ground, whether that be between black and white, between revolutionary and peacekeeper or between a lonely child and the bullies that don’t understand him.

You just have to find the bravery to explore the grey.

Isn’t it time you found yours?