Thinking Out Loud
The deeper I dive into this thing we call existence, the more I realize that I just don’t know what the hell is going on. For every true statement that I think I can make, I’m regularly presented with some piece of sand in the gears that could throw the whole idea out of whack. And I’m super thankful for this website and outlet in which I can work out all the messy details and thoughts that run through my mind. So here’s what I’ve been thinking about this past month.
A recent show I watched suggested that the natural order of things was disorder.
That human being’s attempts to construct governments and systems and every other method of control there is, exist simply as an attempt to fight the universal stream that we all reside in. It’s a pretty good thought. Go look outside. Where in nature do you find a straight line? Where can you say that the ground is level? It seems like the natural world happens by accident and somewhat haphazardly. Then we come along and try to clean it up a bit for our own experiencing pleasure or comfort. Taoism seems to lean toward this thought. At a time when China was being ravaged by political unrest and warlords ruling every province with an iron fist, Taoism emerged as an idea of turning away from development and returning to a more natural form of life. Essentially going back to basics and closer to the evolutionary animal that we had been.
It’s a cool thought in a lot of ways. I mean, how many animals living in the wild do you know that struggle from anxiety and depression? Their lives are much more subject to immediate and constant change than ours, yet I’ve never seen the nature documentary where a gazelle has a panic attack because the lion is lurking close by. No, they seem to just go about their business as usual without much of a care even though they are in a very real and imminent danger.
But I’m not so sure that disorder is the way of things. After all, even in the example of the gazelle and the lion, both predator and prey seem to fall nicely into the structured game that nature has allowed them to exist in. The lion hunts in a pack and through some method of communication, the pride is able to work as a team and bring down their prey. The gazelles live in a herd, knowing instinctively that there is safety in numbers and that the further to the middle they reside, the less likely the chance of them getting picked off.
So maybe structured order is a weird human quest that we have embarked upon, but there seems to be order in nature all the same.
No, I think that the answer might lie in another word and it’s one of my favorites.
Balance.
Let’s run it back to the high school days and see if we can’t remember a little bit of the mostly useless information we were fed. I remember having a distaste for chemistry class from the very beginning. There were too many elements to learn and too many abbreviations. The legwork to do anything worthwhile seemed to be too much. But when we finally got that under control, we went to something that turned out to be quite useful for me and that’s balancing equations. So in your typical math class up until that point you’d have to work on one side of the equal sign until you could figure out the other side.
Chemistry class was different. It seemed that everything that was following the rules set up in the chem lab was trying to reach what they called steady state. That tip of the needle where everything was perfectly balanced. So in this case you didn’t work with one side of the equal sign. You worked with both. Something happening over here would drastically alter what was happening over there and anything that you did would have some sort of reaction. So it was like math, but I guess more real world math.
This struggle to reach balance is something that feels more true to me than a lot of other thoughts or concepts I come across or try to work into my own spirituality practice. I’ve certainly never been the monk-type so I’m not sober, chaste or what one would call devout. But after a particularly vice-heavy weekend I will take my quiet little holidays to reset. I will on occasion dedicate myself to a discipline such as yoga, Breathwork or journaling. But whenever I roll too deeply into one study, I feel the need to step out, lest I become engulfed by the practice.
For me, it’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that.
Science seems to cross over into the natural world as well. Returning to the lions and the antelope, as you all hoped we would, the struggle of hunter and hunted is always tipping back and forth. When the pride can’t make a kill, they don’t get to eat and the weaker lions will starve. If a kill hasn’t happened in a while then the herd of antelope reproduce more, creating a greater host for this new pride of survivors to pick from. Back and forth the pendulum swings.
And right now you might be thinking that I’m starting to sound a lot like Thanos, main villain of the Marvel Universe, when he tries to wipe out half of existence in order to help life to succeed and not over consume. I’ll admit that would be a pretty good connection, what with a global pandemic running amuck, but that’s not really where I’m going with this. Hell, even Thanos’ goal for balance created a response on the other side of the equal sign, getting Captain America and Iron Man to squash their beef and team up for one last rodeo.
Something happens, and then this big crazy universe creates the proper reaction. An evil villain produces heroes. A global virus produces a vaccine. A question of our species’ existence produces an answer to why we might be here, several answers really. The further you go down the rabbit hole, the more questions you’ll find. You’ll get answers too, but with the acquisition of new knowledge comes the creation of better questions. It all just serves to balance out the equation.