I was nearly three years old the first time I thought “I am me.” I was standing in my bedroom and I was thinking the words, repeating the phrase again and again. I felt a sense of endless expanse and then a sense of vanishing into thin air, of nothingness. I could oscillate between the two feelings as long as I repeatedly thought the words.

At the time and for quite some time afterward, I described the experience to my parents simply by saying, “I am me!” I had expected that they knew what I was talking about. Such optimism! Then again, I wasn’t aware at the time that it might be such an experience was, while not necessarily unique across all people, certainly uncommon for a three-year-old.

In realizing one’s uniqueness, one senses the start and expansion of one’s own existence. In recognizing one’s finiteness, one senses the collapse of and end to one’s existence. Existence and annihilation are what I refer to as the fundamental paradox, and the source of Dramatic Tension.

The incongruity of existence and annihilation itself serves to underlie all other paradoxes. As phenomena, the paradoxical are beyond the ken of one whose perception is defined as within or encompassed by the medium from which the paradoxical springs.

It is only upon removing one’s perceptive sense from the medium that one might differently perceive the paradoxical - not as the mutuality of the mutually exclusive, or an impossible form of figure and ground. Instead, one finds new ground from which springs the paradox and when taken in view of this newly perceived ground, the paradox melts, much like the mirage of an oasis as one draws nearer. A return of one’s perception to the original medium and the paradox returns. A few steps back and so does the mirage.

The incongruity of existence and annihilation is the source from which all paradox spring. And yet, only one’s perspective need change to manifest or eliminate the paradox.