Lessons on duality from an Irish bathroom
My recent vacation in Ireland was not the trip I would have planned. At least not if my intention had been to really experience the country. But, getting the true Irish experience was not the purpose of this particular vacation. Rather, this trip was essentially a family vacation, of all Americans and 1 German, that happened to take place in Ireland.
My brother and his wife are temporarily living in Ireland (for her work), and so my mom, stepdad, sister, sister-in-law, and my two nieces all flew over to visit them. My husband and I (who currently live in Germany) took the opportunity to see family without having to make a transatlantic flight to the US.
One of the things you get to experience while traveling, regardless of the amount of planning and intention that goes into the trip, are the bathrooms. This is especially true for me as I drink a lot of water and therefore have to go to the bathroom all the time.
Bathrooms are universal, and yet each country has their own take on them. I have experienced all sorts of bathrooms throughout my travels. I have lived in Morocco where there are mostly squat toilets and where they often use external propane gas tanks to heat their shower water, which makes using hot water feel a little dangerous. In Germany the toilets have much less standing water in them and the toilet bowls are shallow and wide so that your poop doesn’t immediately disappear into an abyss, making it easy to inspect your poop, which, as a health conscious person, I love.
Given the wide exposure I’ve had to bathrooms all over the world, I wasn’t expecting to encounter many (if any) surprises with bathrooms in Ireland. I sort of assumed bathrooms within Europe would all be essentially the same. As it turned out though, I ended up having a profound experience in one of our airbnb bathrooms due to a quirk of Irish bathroom sinks.
The quirk about Irish bathroom sinks is that, for some reason, bathrooms in Ireland, both public and private, are nearly all equipped with the antiquated system that forces hot and cold water out of two separate faucets.
Having two separate faucets with different temperatures of water, is just plain inefficient at temperature regulation. It forces you to choose between quite hot water or rather cold water, neither being the exact right temperature. There is no in-between, no lukewarm, no spectrum of temperatures available, just these two binary options at the two ends of the extreme. I found myself going back and forth, between the two faucets, hot-cold, hot-cold, hot-cold, with my hands, my wash rag, my toothbrush, to see if I could approximate the right temperature, but to no avail, never finding the right water temperature.
Do they really expect you to put the plug in the drain and fill up the sink, letting the hot and cold water mix in the sink basin, in order to approximate your desired temperature? Do they not know that sink basins are one of the dirtiest places in a house? Or, is there a special bucket that only Irish people know about hidden away somewhere that was used for this purpose?
And, none of this nonsense made sense to me anyway because the shower and kitchen sinks in Ireland are not set up this way. The shower and kitchen sinks used “normal” modern systems, where the hot and cold came out of a single faucet. Therefore, it is clear that the plumbing necessary to make this superior system possible exists in this country. So, clearly there was something that I didn’t understand going on here that causes Irish people to choose the two faucet systems for bathroom sinks.
I have, of course, encountered this type of faucet before, but in Ireland they were ubiquitous. In the US, sinks like this are mostly limited to very old homes, especially places that are going for a more Victorian look.
One day toward the end of the trip, I was feeling frustrated with how omnipresent these ineffective sinks on this trip. I was sitting on the toilet at the airbnb, staring at this sink in front of me, feeling all this, and I suddenly realized that these sinks are actually a great example of a problem I personally regularly encounter …duality.
I find myself feeling stuck and confused sometimes because my life seems to be presenting me with two opposing options…this or that.
Should I sleep a little longer, so that I’ll feel more rested when I get up, but get a later start to the day? Or, should I get up early so that I utilize the precious morning hours to do all of the things that make me feel good and set me up for having a productive, good day?
Should I buy an air conditioner for our bedroom so that we can sleep through the night in the summer months, or should I suffer through the two to three months of hot nights and save the money and vote for the environment?
Should I surrender and go with where life seems to be pulling me or should I persevere toward the path I want.
Did my daughter die because of a medical error that could/should have been prevented or because that was simply her time and life path and there was nothing we could do about it?
It turns out that duality is not really a problem unique to me, but a universal human “problem” that most people encounter and that many spiritual traditions explicitly address. The human problem of duality is often described as two sides of the same coin, situations where there are two opposing, yet complementary, sides, and where the existence of one makes possible the existence of the other.
Some common dualities in life are:
Good and bad
Wrong and right
Up and down or Left and right
North and South or East and West
Love and hate
Light and dark
Hard and easy
Success and failure
Intimacy and independence
Companionship and loneliness
Excitement and boredom
Rich and poor
Peace and war
Healthy and sick
Dirty and clean
Protons and electrons
Joy and sadness
Birth and death
Sound and silence
Feminine and masculine
I’ve even heard duality described as a fundamental feature of the brain. Basically, we cannot understand what hot is unless we have experienced cold. We wouldn’t know what light is if it weren't for the dark.
Oftentimes duality can cause suffering because, as humans, we have preferences and make judgements. We want our life to be filled with the sides of the coin we like best, such as joy and excitement, and we fail to acknowledge that life actually comes with both sides of the coin. Sadness and boredom are also part of a whole and full existence.
Having too much of one thing can even be harmful (and maybe also boring). Exposure to both sides of the coin provides balance. Though I enjoy feeling the sun on my skin, and it provides vitamin D, which is an essential nutrient, being in the sun too long can be uncomfortable, cause sunburns, and, if done repeatedly overtime, without protection, can lead to skin cancer and premature aging. We need breaks, even from something as inviting as the sun, both to be able to fully enjoy it, but also because too much of one thing comes with its own set of challenges.
Many spiritual traditions advise responding to the problem of duality by simply seeing and accepting these contradictions. They suggest that understanding the interconnected and complementary nature of this reality is what brings unity, oneness, and is what allows you to move beyond duality to non-duality.
But, for me, simply knowing this, doesn’t always work. In general, I’m a “yes, and” type person (or at least I try to be), but sometimes my mind encounters thoughts or decisions that feel like they cannot both be simultaneously true.
This is where the Irish sink comes in.
When I encounter a duality that I cannot overcome, my mind feels like this two-faucet sink. I feel stuck in an old pattern of thinking, equipped with outdated plumbing. Staring at this dual-faucet sink in the airbnb gave me a concrete representation of the problem and the solution. When it comes to bathroom sinks, even though they are rare in Ireland, I know that there are different options out there. There are sinks that are designed so that the water comes out at the exact temperature you want from a single faucet. Heck, I even use this very type of sink at home every day.
When I encounter the problem of duality in my own life, it is not enough for me to accept that both hot and cold exist, instead, I want to redo the plumbing so that I can effectively utilize the whole spectrum of temperatures that exists between the two extremes. I am okay with accepting duality, and simply acknowledging the existence of two sides of the coin, but I’m even more interested in finding a way to move beyond the duality and actually create new solutions that simply and elegantly expand what is possible.
I recently came across a quote in the Marginalian newsletter by Jacob Needleman that speaks to this.
Stay with the contradiction. If you stay, you will see that there is always something more than two opposing truths. The whole truth always includes a third part, which is the reconciliation.
Like modern faucets that incorporate hot and cold into a single stream of water, this quote captures exactly what I am aiming for as a “solution” to duality in my own life. Modern sinks provide a concrete example of what non-duality, oneness or unity looks like in real life. The old Irish bathroom sinks that I had found so annoying are artifacts of what life is like when limited by problems of duality. These sinks have become a visual motivation for me to continue to sit with problems of duality, trusting that a solution, a reconciliation, is possible.
My new theory is that the Irish are philosophical geniuses that incorporate important life lessons into everyday household items like bathroom sinks;)
