What Goes Up Must Come Down

Issac Newton once said, “what goes up must come down.” He was simply describing the implications of the Law of Gravitation that he had discovered, but as I go through my own life, I keep coming back to this very statement as a law of our own existence. Life is complicated, humans are not mathematical constants, we drift, we swim, we dance, we rage, and stumble through life. Our world is not stationary, the only constant is change. But why?

That’s how my brain works, I can’t stop asking why. The fire of curiosity that’s extinguished from every child’s mind, it’s still alive in me. It’s what drives me. I can’t stop asking questions, I need to understand how this world works. So why? Why can’t we humans, or so many of us, be consistent. Why can’t that feeling of optimism be consistent, why can’t our anger towards the wrong be consistent, why does it diminish, why do feelings fade away? Why can’t we keep our promises or follow up with our resolutions?

The answer lies in the question itself, we’re not consistent creatures, we’re just built this way.

Bummer. I like to think of this as “conscious travelling.” Our minds are not built to stay, they are built to jump from one thought to another, from one collection of neurons to another. Everything links to something else, that’s how our entire world is constructed. Essentially, we are like web crawlers, clicking from one neuro-hyperlink to another. Even when we’re sleeping, we’re travelling in our minds.

And it is this travelling that brings with it the inconsistency, or so I deduce from my pondering. Every day, every event, is like adding a new location to our conscious world map, and the more we visit the place, the more familiar and integral to our personality it becomes. There’s of course more to this than I’m describing here, but for the scope of this article, it is sufficient.

I’m writing this as a response to the last two days not being productive for me. I don’t know what went wrong, everything looked fine couple of days ago, and then my mind just turned off. This keeps happening, and I expect it happens to everyone else. I was up, and now I’m down. Meaning, another high is on the horizon. That’s another source of motivation for me, the fact that a high can occur only when there is a low. But how do you fix it? How do you stay on track? How do you keep the high consistent?

By clicking the back button as soon as possible, of course. If you have an intimate understanding of what you want to spend your time doing, thinking, working on, then all you need to do it roll back and start over. You need to realize and admit that you have drifted away and then consciously travel back where you started. How do you do that, by asking yourself what motivated you to do the original work in the first place.

If you can’t answer why something is important to you, it might just be infatuation. And if it is, then it’s gonna be hard to go back. Might as well just keep exploring, keep travelling, until you stumble on to something you do care about passionately.

I’m on a personal challenge to write something everyday. If you liked this, you might wanna hit that green button and follow me to read more :)

See you tomorrow,
16/01/2017