Stuck in the Polar Vortex

How do we break the cycle of conflict and contempt?

Nearly every night for the past eight weeks, I’ve sat in the glare of makeup lights and methodically transformed into an older, fatter, crankier, droopier version of myself.

I sit down in my dressing room and spread white foundation on my skin to make it look dry and shriveled. I accentuate every line on my face and neck with dark brown powder, creating cavernous wrinkles. Then, lest any youthful glow remain, I pick up a container labeled “ash powder,” and dust it over the whole shebang. Finally, I pat bright red rouge on the apples of my cheeks, poorly blended, in the manner of an elderly lady with failing eyesight who’s never heard of YouTube, let alone watched a makeup tutorial. 

Before donning my gray wig, I pull on spandex shorts stuffed with padding for my tummy and hips. I strap a pair of ponderous rice-filled bags onto my chest, where they hang down to my navel. I squeeze my legs into padded stockings that evoke cankles with moderate edema (these I’ve lovingly dubbed Merkin and Gherkin). Ta da: Ready for my closeup, Mr. DeMille. 

I’m playing Mrs. Boyle in the Guthrie Theater’s production of The Mousetrap by Agatha Christie. She’s a grumpy old broad, and I can feel myself getting heavier as I become her—not just physically but energetically. Gravity pulls on the cankles, my jowls, my furrowed brow. My walk becomes a clomp. My gaze becomes a scowl. My natural ebullience sifts to the bottom of a cloudy seabed and rests there, waiting to be retrieved post-show. 

This is the opposite of what I do in front of my mirror at home. There, I slather my 43-year-old skin with potions and creams to minimize lines and wrinkles. I go to the gym to slim, strengthen, and tone. I do nightly guided meditations to foster kindness and gratitude in my heart. Though I long ago grew out my natural, early gray, I have an appointment tomorrow to blend pigment into my hair again, for the first time in years.

Staring at myself as Mrs. Boyle in the mirror every night has inspired me to double down on my anti-aging efforts in real life. It has felt like a warning: Here’s where this could all be headed. Do not go gentle into that good night. #Resist.

---

I’ve been thinking about polarity, about pendulum swings and vibe shifts. Our country’s toxic polarization has been thoroughly documented and analyzed, but I keep stewing on it. I think it’s the key to everything. Or at least a key to something—something crucial underlying our dysfunction, something waiting to be grasped, like the handle of a door that leads from a dungeon to a meadow. 

How did it get this bad? The chasm between the poles of left and right filled with so much mutual malice? Pure contempt, uncut fear and loathing. It’s everywhere, inescapable, spewing forth from everyone, from my friends on Facebook to the talking heads on TV to the current occupant of the White House.

Collectively, we’ve been lurching from one extreme to another for years, and the oscillations just keep getting wilder. Whenever one side stages a symbolic triumph—whether it’s the performative virtue of Pelosi and Schumer kneeling in Kente stoles to announce police reform in 2020, or the performative cruelty of the White House posting a cartoon image of a weeping fentanyl dealer being arrested by ICE—sentiments on the opposing side flare and burn hotter. The animus grows.

Luigi Mangione shoots a healthcare executive in the head and people on the left donate more than $1 million to his defense. A lady on a playground calls a kid the n-word and raises north of $750K from people on the right. These aren’t equivalent acts, but the reflexive tribal response is the same: defend your own, reward the signal.

I’m looking for a way out of all this—a way to dilute the forces making the poles into parodies of themselves. What I keep coming back to is that the sides are in tension with each other, yes, but they also depend on each other. The extremity of a pendulum’s swing on one end is defined by how far it swings on the other. (I don’t think I’d have considered coloring my hair again if I hadn’t been staring at a super-aged version of myself in the mirror every night. It wasn’t until I saw one extreme that I felt the need to counter-balance it with another.)

In a vacuum, a pendulum slows. To widen its swing, it needs energy, just enough, added again and again. That’s what we—the people, the media, the algorithms—are doing with our reactivity, the passion we pour into demonizing the other side, and the way we allow our reflexive opposition to force us toward more and more extreme positions of our own. We’re keeping the swing alive, and sending it ever further out. 

You can feel this, can’t you? The accelerating, widening, sickening swings? From calls to abolish the police to proposals to export “homegrown criminals” to supermax prisons abroad. From broad access to social services for undocumented migrants to sweeping deportations. From rigid purity tests on trans issues to bathroom bills and bans on trans military service. From strict vaccination mandates to collapsing child vaccination rates. From “masculinity is toxic” to Andrew Tate. The list goes on. 

Is this the widening gyre that Yeats wrote about? The center cannot hold, indeed. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

The fear, of course, is that if we dial back—temper our rhetoric or try to accommodate different perspectives—the pendulum will simply stop in an unacceptable middle ground, or worse, come to rest on the side we oppose. 

So. What to do? 

I’ve come to believe this isn’t something we can think our way out of. Not exclusively, anyway. There are intellectual habits that can help—reading a wide range of perspectives (including those you’re inclined to disagree with), grappling sincerely with the steelman version of opposing arguments, being skeptical of stories that confirm and stoke your pre-existing biases, etc. That stuff is all good and helpful. But new vistas opened for me when I started approaching this energetically.

It turns out that (surprise!) none of this is new. Ancient spiritual traditions have observed for millennia that strong energies tend to rise in tandem—and in tension—with their opposites. The path of wisdom, they seem to agree, isn’t resistance or domination, but integration. Wholeness. Balance. Coherence.

In Taoism, yin and yang represent the dynamic balance of opposites; in Hindu philosophy, non-dualism sees apparent dualities as illusions masking a deeper unity. Buddhism’s Middle Way advocates balance between extremes, while Hermetic teachings describe polarity as a natural law requiring reconciliation. Sufi mysticism embraces spiritual transformation through the tension of opposites (e.g., pain and ecstasy).

Christian writers like Richard Rohr have noted that the cross can be seen as a collision of opposites, holding the tension of heaven and earth, time and eternity, life and death, love and suffering. Even Jungian psychology goes hard on the integration of the shadow self. 

That’s jolly good for the mystics and the sages. But how do the rest of us integrate something we abhor? How do we even begin to want to?

I found a few answers in a guided meditation course I stumbled across on the Insight Timer app, called Balancing Polarity Through Modern & Ancient Lenses. It uses practices and insights from Kabbalah (the mystical teachings of Judaism), the Tao, and western philosophy to guide the listener through locating and holding polar energies in the body: safety vs. freedom; lovingkindness vs. boundaries/discipline; stability vs. change. 

Each of these pairs are interdependent, existing in dynamic tension. Rather than opposites to choose between, they’re complementary values that must be balanced over time. Each offers benefits but can also be toxic in excess. Too much stability leads to stagnation, too much change to chaos. Too much selfless kindness can lead to exploitation, too much discipline to cruelty. 

Most of us naturally resonate more with one pole than the other, but collectively, we need to honor the shared purpose uniting the whole spectrum. Like parents who bring both unconditional love and wise boundaries to the shared purpose of raising their child.

This idea in particular was a show-stopper for me: Those on the fringe, who gravitate strongly toward one pole and are highly sensitive to the downsides of the opposite, are often the system’s earliest alarm. Their deep identification with one pole makes them especially attuned to signs that the other pole is becoming overemphasized or mismanaged. They feel the imbalance before it becomes visible to all.

They might strike the majority as extreme, but their presence is crucial. They’re early warners—guardians of polarity health—because they’re the first to sense when the group is tipping too far in one direction. Their sensitivity is a form of wisdom. 

Thinking about things in this way instantly softened my heart toward those still taking what I (as someone who tilts more toward freedom than safety) consider extreme Covid safety precautions. It helps me value both the prison abolitionists and the law-and-order maximalists, the Amish and the techno transhumanists. Maybe, to be healthy, we need them all. 

This doesn’t necessarily give us a useful roadmap for electing politicians or making policy. But I think it does do something valuable—it lessens the energy of contempt. It says, “I see the values underlying your position, even if I don’t share your preferred solution.” That alone changes the relational field. It moves us out of a fight for dominance and into shared stewardship. Disagreement becomes a natural and necessary dynamic rather than a sign of moral failure. Even when consensus isn’t possible, mutual respect is. 

Energy starts to sap from the swinging pendulum. It keeps moving, because it’s supposed to. That’s the nature of polarity: motion, rhythm, a spiral born of tension plus time. But we can relax into it, as an expression of a vast harmony we're learning to trust, a sign of our aliveness, our mutuality, the way the Whole that we came from fractured and spread itself around so it could look at itself from different angles. 

We don’t need to land in the middle. We never will. But we can find a little more equanimity and a little less nausea—less extremity—in the swing. 

---

I’m in my dressing room now, typing this in the final few minutes before curtain call. I’ve taken my age makeup off, but my wig is still on. The cankles are off, and the boobs. The skin on my neck is sagging in ways I don’t like, but my cheeks still have a glow. 

There’s one wrinkle in particular I’ve grown quite fond of while accentuating it night after night. It’s a cute little fella—just to the left of my mouth. Presumably, it came from laughing. 

I’m keen to stop exaggerating it, but I don’t want to erase it either. I suppose I’ll let it be—a line of tension stretching between the easy mirth of youth and the sober wisdom of age. Give it a pluck, and it might sing.