Imagine a single seesaw: a narrow beam resting on a pivot at its midpoint; as one end goes up, the other goes down.

Now add another seesaw perpendicular to the first. And keep adding saws the same way you would halve slices of pie, cutting in straight diametric lines from crust to crust.

It should now look as if you drew several dozen straight lines through the center of a circle connecting opposite sides and then erased the outer circle.

Now you have the static image; let’s make it dynamic and set the seesaws in motion. Every saw can rotate 90 degrees on its pivot in one plane to one side or the other. If all the seesaws teeter really fast in both directions you can see a blurred sphere.

Instead of children-sized seats at either end of each beam, imagine opposing ideas: religion and atheism, government and anarchy, wealthy and poor, solitude and community, home and travel, pride and humility, specialization and diversification, order and chaos.

Everyone has their own web of seesaws. Each saw indicates where they stand on an issue, tilted to one side or the other: as one end goes up, the other goes down. No saw is zero-sum; the tilt is continuous.

A person’s web is a snapshot of their beliefs at the time. Some have seesaw webs like flat snowflakes (balance). And others have a bundle of sticks pointing in all directions (imbalance). And still others have snowflakes with just a few tilted sticks.

But our webs are not static. In flux, each saw tips as we learn about the issue. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”