Monday, May 12, 2025
With a flip of a coin, you’re doomed. This is what life feels like for many. Detail means “an individual feature, fact, or item.” Its origins are funny, from French détail, from dé- (expressing separation) + tailler ‘to cut’ (based on Latin talea ‘twig, cutting’). Welcome to the “tail’s side” of life, the shadow of doubt. Just beyond this shadow of doubt is the benefit of the doubt, the devil in the so-called details.
On one side of a coin it says, “In God We Trust.” That’s the obverse side, or the “head’s side,” typically featuring the profile of a prominent figure. On the reverse, or the tail’s side is an abstraction. This is the side we call bad luck, misfortune, or “the way it is.” So a hero is born, a presidential figure who will overcome the abstraction and set the world upright. Head over tails!
Why can’t good and evil coexist as Truth? When you only see one side, God is our hero who seems to be struggling to win over “himself.” When you see both sides of a coin, the matter suddenly resolves. Somehow, you have to visit hell to see how harmless it really is. The coin has two sides, but for some weird reason, we can’t expose them both at once. It seems logic won’t allow.
Welcome to enlightenment. You’re printing your own currency, forgetting everything comes with a tail’s side. The coin is minted in the same treasury, but never are both sides seen together, simultaneously. Well, they are in a way, but after you’ve seen the light. The abstraction on the tail’s side is nothing to be feared. Fishing around the so-called dark side reveals a little detail – the tail-end of “God,” the devil with a tail and a pitchfork cutting up what’s essentially unbreakable and whole, harmoniously paired, and well-played. Touché.