Have you ever noticed how the good and bad seem to ebb and flow? Sometimes you’re on fire, and other times you simply can’t catch a break. There are continuous peaks and valleys that seem to permeate our life in every aspect. Why do we go from feeling amazing one week, accomplishing all our goals, and hitting the mark to feeling down, unaccomplished, and stuck the next?
Ebbs and flows are present in every aspect of life whether we like it or not. There are bull and bear cycles in the market, games where we can’t make a shot, and days where everything we do seems to fit.
I believe it is due to the notion of becoming comfortable. Being comfy is a fleeting feeling that never really persists for too long. Why? If we have friends, family, money, and are working on our passions, why don’t we just feel comfy all the time? It is in our human nature to not let ourselves feel comfortable for too long: we constantly need to find, assess, and mitigate risks. Our primal survival instincts are what drive us to do anything in life, and in an age where we can satiate all basic human needs incredibly easy, our instincts are often left with nothing to do. So we make up problems that we can solve. Humans are incredibly adaptable to their circumstances. It’s said that you can become used to nearly any situation after just 6 months. We learn to adapt quickly to our surroundings, good or bad. This creates expectations for what should happen in our life. When we hit the lotto or land a new job, the feeling of being on top of the world does not last long because we simply adapt to this new normal. Having boat loads of money or being at the top of our company is now “normal” for us — so anything less than that seems jarring to our current state of mind.
We don’t go through ebbs and flows because our life is actually getting better or worse constantly, rather we adapt to a new norm and then anything that does not perfectly align with that sense of normal seems off. I believe there is something magnificent about human adaptiveness and our ability to make any situation “work,” but there is an extent as to how much you can actually buy into these norms. If you believe that everything good thing that happens to you is absolutely expected, then when one small thing goes wrong, everything seems to break down.
Living a life of level-headedness or “the middle path” as Buddhists say, can seem boring because we don’t get those huge thrills — but we also don’t get the massive downswings that come with it. Living a life of balance mitigates these ebbs and flows and allows you to take things as they are and not let them determine your entire being. Comfy is simply the feeling we get when we have escaped a lesser situation and traded up for something better. Once you become used to this level of comfy, anything out of the ordinary will throw you out of wack. The feeling of comfort doesn’t last long, and this is why many people seem to be in constant swings, rather than living a steady life where you simply just “be.”
