I think i disagree with you on not having duality. There is lots of duality in life and throughout the physical realm.
Hot and cold
Forward and backward
Alive and dead (stealing from your post :D)
There’s lots of things that are a duality in life and how we live. Love and hate are good ones too. We have lots of things in between of course but to say there isn’t a duality I think is a little too simplistic.
With life there are more complex things but having dualities makes things a little bit easier. In trying to formulate my response here I think I understand a bit why we are pushed into this 2-choice situation quite a bit. Left and right (politics), peace and war, feast and famine.
Now that I think about it more, and instead of editing my comment away perhaps you are correct in a way, but not exactly how I think you were meaning it.
There’s far more than 2 things in these scenarios. Love and hate are good examples - we can have lust, infatuation, distrust, anger, and likely several dozen more in each of these specific categories.
Alive and dead - death can be the final culmination but if we are bedridden and a vegetable - are we really alive? I think we are far more alive than we realize but we get distracted by the fear-porn and doom scrolling of the media landscape that we are bathed in. I still think that we are very vibrantly alive, much more than we are dead! Similar to above - there are dozens of states between alive and dead which makes it not so simple to have a binary.
I ma getting into bed, but will ask a question, what is the experience of hot and cold in the now? Can anything be experienced there, and if everything is completely still on the now, heat doesn't transfer, so hot and cold becomes the same.
Well for hot and cold, thinking physiologically, they infer much different responses. Cold boosts fat burning and metabolism because we are trying to warm up and the cells go nuts trying to get warm. When we are hot we are trying to shed temperature as much as possible so we are dumping water and salt. They can't be the same because our bodies would never react the same way, at least under normal circumstances, so I think it wouldn't make sense that they are not two different experiences. This ends up being two totally different things for our minds.
You are looking at it from the practical sense of being human - the only way we can look at these things. This is more from the practical sense of the universe - which doesn't have experience in the same way we do. A reaction is about movement across time, not the "now".
This article is super impractical to live life by, but it gets me thinking a bit because I can kind of shut my brain off from conscious thought at will. So, in those moments, am I alive?
And, I believe that we can't actually live in the "now", because it is a timeless point and still and we experience through movement, as you mentioned.
As said - super impractical :D