Yesterday night I had an uncontrollable laughing fit. Someone was snoring EXTREMELY loudly in the room and both the bunk below me and the bunk beside me lost it.
So of course that set me off.
I paid for it that night though, because I got way less sleep than normal. Karma.
To calm myself down, I told myself that the snoring would make me more grateful for the days where there isn’t snoring (hopefully tonight, with just four beds in the room!). Just like my approach to the rain, inspired by Day 2 - submit and the experience will reward at some point.
At some point, though, I begin to wonder whether this line of thinking implies that the outcomes of our world exist in equilibrium, just as is true for our physical world (yay for Newton!). Is there some perfect balance between bad and good, undesirable and desirable? Karma is one example, but the beauty of symmetry and balance is apparent all across religion, and to be even more general, humanity.
So it’s an appealing thought to have. It was the subject of a conversation I had a few weeks ago, an incredibly meaningful discussion that I didn’t get the chance to write about. So I want to unpack the thought.
Today I complained to a friend back home that my entire lower body was sore - legs, feet, knees. Today was a tough day. But then I remembered a promise I made myself a few days ago to de-emphasize complain and emphasize gratitude. So I corrected myself and told her that the soreness was for good reason, because the views today were simply spectacular. Notice that these two come hand in hand - the views only were accessible through the hard work of climbing uphill, and I would argue the hard work made the views just that much sweeter.
Life is a give and take - it balances opportunity and responsibility, positive and negative emotion.
But I am more and more doubtful that the mental response to suffering that I outline above (“you need suffering to appreciate the good moments”) actually means that there is some higher mandate for a perfect balance or equilibrium in the world.
I’ll preface to say doubt does not mean judgement for those who believe it! I am trying to learn and I learn by voicing my doubts :).
First, if there was actually some higher order mandate for balance, it does not make sense to me that experiencing the lows in life intensifies the emotion of the highs.
Let me use a sports example. Imagine that you are on one side of a sports rivalry (team A), but you always beat your opponent (team B). You are likely to feel less of an emotional high with each win in contrast to a more even rivalry, where you experience the lows of losing. But if you believed in a universal mandate for balance, why would you celebrate the wins more because you experience the losses? Doesn’t it all even out in the end? Do you convince yourself that you might as well really feel the emotion of both the losses and the wins, ignoring that they’ll be roughly equal in magnitude anyway?
Based on this example, it seems that balance only intensifies gratitude when you don’t actually know if balance will be achieved. When you treat a loss as a death knell, a precedent that will be extremely hard to overcome (hence your reaction - we’ll NEVER win the championship now!), you are implying that you are not actually of the belief that “everything will work out in the end” and to “just have faith.”
Ok, maybe you believe that this one area of your life is doomed to suffering, but that it’ll pay off in some other dimension of your life. I still think my argument stands - if you believe it’ll cancel out why the doom and gloom or the sunshine and butterflies?
Maybe I am just over analyzing emotions. Humans are emotional and it’s a wonderful part of who we are.
Here’s a second doubt that I have. How does this idea implicate the good things you do in this life? Do they trade off with or “cause” something bad?
This is true sometimes, when you sacrifice something to achieve something else. Like sacrificing your legs to let your eyes feast. Collateral damage.
One cool debate in 2020 as Amy Cindy Barrett went through the nomination process for SCOTUS concerned adding Democratic justices to the Supreme court as a counter to Republican hypocrisy. If you’re a Democrat you might consider this a good idea - but as the argument goes, Republicans will jump at the first chance to do the same. Perfect balance, just way more chaotic. So maybe not worth it.
And actually, most all of politics feels like this to me - transactions, give or takes. But that’s because politics is definitionally oppositional - two parties pitted against each other.
And I prefer to think that I am not pitting myself against the world, that the world or a higher power is taking just as it is giving to even everything out. And I don’t think like this - I think of myself as hopefully contributing positively to the world, and the world contributing positively to who I am.
And maybe that’s it - this is the thought that keeps me sleeping soundly at night, so I choose to think it. And for those not as privileged, who experience suffering on orders of magnitude much higher than dealing with snoring or leg soreness, the idea of balance lets them get some shuteye.