The inevitability of lows

Let’s put aside for a moment our insane and slightly irrational need for exclusivity from everything we encounter in life, and step back towards the basics. Cliché’s, I feel, are underrated and if studied correctly and in reasonable regulation, can pave a way to self-awareness. One of them says that the only constant in life is change. Now this might seem to you unoriginal and amount as mediocre writing. But will you pause for a moment and unveil the words? There’s a world of meaning inside.

I will ask: What is the most frustrated you’ve ever been? What was the cause? What deterred you from your path and direction, if ever you were? What demoralized you so your head hung and your back slouched, and slowly the spark in your eyes faded? Was it the unknown? No. The unknown can only awaken in you a fear, however strong and firm, but it cannot deviate you from the path. Then what was it? It was change. One day you felt accomplished and slept with a satisfied conscience that you’ve achieved what you set out for. The next, perhaps, you couldn’t. It kept you up at night. Now, if recurring, it’s the most toxic feeling for any driven individual: failure. So in order to escape it, your mind makes excuses and you begin to avoid your responsibilities because the nagging feeling of having failed and not being good enough is enough to kindle in you an instability that’s unnerving. This is where the aforementioned frustration comes from.

But such is life that we’ve, in all our limited capacities and measures, aimed to understand. This one bold claim also relates to the widely debated and persistent idea of darkness as the absence of light and evil as the absence of “good”. In relativity to this idea, lows are then simply the absence of “highs”. If one refers to a low in life no matter what it’s magnitude or nature, as ending slightly before the finishing line defining a certain “accomplishment”, it will not be as discerning as admitting failure which more often than not, leads to defeat. The flip side of this philosophy argues that if the former is true, than light will have no value if there wasn’t the occasional darkness to register in our minds as the low. If there was no low, how would you know the significant of achievement? If the road to accomplishment was constant and plain, with no alternate to reinforce in us the need to excel, how would humans know when to push harder?

Perhaps it makes sense that the human body feels pain, for if it didn’t, how would we know the contentment of feeling healthy? The occasional darkness is to push us towards the light, and it’s the silent drive that motivates us. Where light has the incessant ability to evoke in us a certain sated state of utter satisfaction, it cannot drive us further – darkness can. Therefore, the lows we experience are nothing but driving forces the universe throws at us, challenging us with raised brows silently to evolve, to learn, to push harder, to try something different, and strive till our last waking breath to catch that light at the end of the tunnel.

Thoughts?