Why Roller Coasters Are Great Metaphors For Life
We go up, we go down. But we don’t have to crash. We can learn to enjoy the ride
Even as we climb, I dread the fall. The click click click of the car on the track rings in my ear with each elevated foot. There is excitement; nervous energy that builds in a place just below my belly button, burning me like a slow kiss of potential on a first date. But I’m not feeling the excitement, or enjoying it. I’m already two steps ahead to what I know is coming.
As the car crests the hill, there is a moment where we seem suspended, paused. I always wish in that split second that I could just stay there, forever if needed. In that instance, I don’t care that it would mean never coming down, or continuing on with life. I do not want to experience the drop.
And then, I am falling. I am clinging white-knuckled, screaming. I’m both convinced it will never end and convinced it’s going to end immediately with my sudden and excruciating death. I wish I could do something to stop it. I’m praying that I live through it, praying that it’s over soon.
And then it is. I didn’t enjoy one single second of it.
My daughter loves roller coasters. She begs for me to take her to amusement parks, the least amusing thing I can ever think to do with a day, and then amps up the torture by insisting that I accompany her on ride after ride after ride. With no husband to pawn off as a suitable substitute, I dutifully stand in line, allow them to strap me in next to her, and start praying. This is the most selfless thing that I do in motherhood.
Have you ever had a moment where you are experiencing what you immediately know is a great moment in your life? It could be a big event, like a wedding, a birth, buying a house, or it could be something so much smaller, so much more ordinary. Maybe it’s just a moment in a park, a dinner, driving down the road…any one split second with your family, your friends, or even just with yourself, where everything is suddenly perfect. Within that moment, you find a peace and joy that leaves you sailing through the world… until it crashes down, and suddenly, you’re unsettled, expecting the end, fearing what might happen in the future, depressed, and/or anxious.
Or, does this sound familiar? You finally finish a project that took months, years even, soaking up your blood, sweat, and tears, and for a moment, you pause, happy. Then, suddenly, you’re falling, immediately deflated, unsure of what to do next, swimming in feelings of sadness, fear, or even anger, that you don’t understand.
The story of emotional lows immediately following huge successes is too common to be random. We feel great, and then we feel absolutely horrible. One moment we are positive we can change the entire world, the next it’s too much to ask of us to move off the couch.
With each great moment of our lives, there is a subsequent moment when it ends.
We go up, we go down. The higher we rise the further we seem to fall down. It becomes such a reliable pattern that people often learn to dread when things are going really well, waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for the fall.
The emotional falls do not even have to be based on actual falls, like being broken up with, suffering from a catastrophic illness, suddenly finding yourself unemployed, or facing some other impossibly scary and grief-filled situation. Even when the outside facts support that things are going well, we seem to still feel these stomach-churning, heart-breaking, life turned upside-down emotional lows after each big win in our lives. The lows can feel like they might wipe us out completely, as if they might never end, even when they aren’t situation based — maybe especially when they aren’t situation based, because we really don’t understand feeling horrible when we can’t point to a specific event that caused those feelings.
But what if we just understood that this was… normal?
What if there was nothing to change, nothing to fix?
Life is like a roller coaster… and I’m not using that as a metaphor. Life is literally just like a roller coaster.
We go up, we go down.
We wait for a time when it all evens out and we can trust that the falls are over.
It doesn’t come. So we continue on. Many of us live white-knuckled, screaming, already anticipating the falls before they happen, unable to fully enjoy the climbs, the peak of the highs, knowing what is about to happen.
Some of us switch to slower, less intense rides. Lower peaks, sure, but the drops don’t feel so bad. Some of us medicate and numb to try to forget we are even on the ride. A few give up and simply get off get altogether.
But what if there was another way?
What if we could just ride the ride… and enjoy it?
All of it. Even the drops, the lows that feel like they might kill us.
It’s doable. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. There are people out there who have learned (or never unlearned) how to enjoy the ride.
It turns out that roller coaster riding is good training for how to live a really great life.
But how the hell do you do learn to enjoy something that seems like it might kill you?
Step 1: Fuck Shame
Don’t assign a story to the lows, beat yourself up, or think that you are wrong or bad.
Have you ever beaten yourself up for breathing? Or eating? Or needing to sleep? We all know that eventually, these are things that everyone has to do.
So why then are we so prone to heaping piles of shame onto the moments when we suddenly contract into sadness, emotionally falling after a big expansion of joy?
Mostly, it’s that we don’t think it’s normal. We don’t realize that this is something that happens, in some way or form, to everyone. Even when things are going remarkably well in life, we can and will likely have moments where we suddenly feel sad, depressed, anxious, angry, or otherwise wretched.
It’s OKAY. There’s nothing wrong with this! You’re not ungrateful, or unreasonable, or selfish, or crazy, or anything else those voices in your head try to tell you when you start to feel shut down, contracted, or just plain miserable. Tell yourself that it’s okay, and just allow what is happening to be normal.
Pretend that life is just like a roller coaster. There will be big climbs. And then there will be, without a doubt, some pretty big falls. If you know they are normal, you won’t be surprised by them.
Instead of wondering where the sadness/anger/otherwise uncomfortable emotion came from, you’ll be able to just recognize them and say to yourself, “Oh, I’m starting to fall. I’m hitting that drop in the track of life.” Maybe it will be a little one, or it might be a doozy of a fall. The thing about life is you can’t see the track ahead, so you won’t really know. But you can trust that it is just one point in an ongoing and constantly changing track. It will not last forever.
Those negative emotions, left to their own devices, will pass right through and leave. I promise.
In fact, the more you lean in and allow them the space they need, the quicker they leave. Feeling sad? Don’t continue rushing about your day. Stop, even if it’s just for 30 seconds, and let that sadness engulf you. Let the tears come out. Anger coming up? Scream in your car, or into a pillow. Throw a temper tantrum on your bed. See what it feels like to actually feel the emotions that are happening, and then… go back to living your life. Repeat if necessary.
When you follow this process, these emotions we so often avoid are sometimes gone within minutes. Other times, it might be a cycle that takes hours, or even days, weeks. But they will leave. The track continues on.
UNLESS…
Unless we throw a layer of shame on top of them.
When we beat ourselves up for feeling the way we do, telling a story that it’s wrong, that it’s bad, that those feelings need to be hidden away and forced down and ignored, we effectively block the emotions from going anywhere. We bury them under a mountain of shame, and trap them in our bodies.
Fuck Shame. Throw it out the window, and repeat until you believe it: This is normal, this is normal, this is normal.
Notice how much quicker your moods seem to improve.
Step 2: Understand the Process
Once we accept that what comes up must go down, and that this is normal, it’s good to start to understand the process a little more thoroughly. If we are going to suffer these emotional drops (and we are, because they are unavoidable), let’s understand what makes them worse.
Imagine you are on a roller coaster… The roller coaster is climbing, higher and higher through the air. As you go over the crest of the hill and start to fall, someone panics, screams “STOP,” and pulls an emergency brake.
What happens? The cart doesn’t just stop, or even slow down. Inertia, speed, and the laws of physics are all in play here. The cart goes flying off the tracks in an epic crash.
There’s carnage. It takes months to reopen the ride. And then, when it’s operational again, you can’t just jump back on where you were. Nope, you have to go back to the start, all the way back to the beginning. You have to strap yourself back in, and agree to go on that ride again, which no doubt feels a lot harder to do now that you’re traumatized from your freak roller coaster crash incident.
Life is exactly the same.
I hear this from clients a lot. They pick up momentum, experience some decent success with a high, and then suddenly, the down comes. Instead of speeding through it, they try to pull an emergency brake, desperately attempting to stop the feelings bringing them lower. Then…crash.
That low is no longer just a temporary dip. It’s complete and total carnage that halts all progress, all speed.
These crashes can take someone out for months after doing something that took just a day or two to accomplish. If you’re doing simple math, you can see that this is not an effective way to make progress on your goals. Plus, it sucks. Crashes are not fun to live through.
So how do you avoid the crash?
You continue full speed ahead into the deep abyss that looks as if it might swallow you whole.
That’s right. Don’t pull the brake, and in fact, don’t even slow down. Remind yourself that it’s normal, and then let yourself feel those feelings with as much intensity as you can.
The quickest way to get back to happiness, to productivity, to feeling really great, is to throw yourself with wild abandon into feeling like total shit. It’s counterintuitive, I know. But it’s true.
The quicker you let yourself fully feel the sadness, the fear, and/or the anger, the quicker you’ll speed right down that track and back up to the next summit, climbing higher toward your next great joy and excitement and achievement.
Then, of course, you’ll fall again. That’s okay. It’s all a part of the ride. Figure out what part of the track you are currently on, and allow yourself to be right there, and nowhere else. You’re strapped in. It’s all an illusion that you can be anywhere else. All you can do is ride the ride.
Once you realize that, it’s a practice to figure out where you are and just be there, without jumping into the future. No avoiding the lows while trying to rush forward to the highs. Equally important: No anticipating the next lows as you start a clear ascent to a high. Practice noticing wherever you currently are, and then… just be there. Enjoy the ride.
Step 3: Let Go. Open Your Eyes. Scream if Necessary.
The entire process is normal, and will go quicker if you don’t try to put on the breaks… So, what should you do then?
Surrender.
I really hate that word. It is the embodiment of the idea that I can’t control everything… but guess what? I can’t. And, neither can you.
So why not just sit back, throw your hands up, and enjoy the ride?
Remember that you are strapped in. It’s an illusion that you can be anywhere else. All you can do is be right where you are.
Give up the idea that you can control it, or that you need to… maybe even that you would want to, even if you could. Because, as it turns out, screaming in terror and gripping tightly to the bar in front of you doesn’t actually change the trajectory of the ride. Attempting to cling tightly to control only changes your experience of the ride. And if you’re going to end up in the same place, regardless, why not enjoy the journey to get there? Even when it’s terrifying?
This is a lot easier said than done, I know.
The idea of surrendering can be truly terrifying. The idea of trusting that you can rush into those downs and not die is foreign to everything our culture teaches us. But, surrender and trust, in the journey, in the process, and in the ride itself, is key to enjoying the ride we call life.
So how to do you teach yourself to surrender?
You practice.
Instead of clinging desperately to the safety rails and praying for it to end… What happens if you just let go? In real life, and in practice situations, can you throw your hands up in the air and scream with glee, or with terror, even just for one second? Two? How long can you stretch it out?
Each time, see if you can go one second longer. Force yourself to check in and find exactly where you are on the ride, and just allow yourself to be there. Let it be okay. For a stretch, see if you can even enjoy it, relaxing your whole body into it, and just… surrender.
The track will continue on. It will take you where you need to go.
Life is a lot like water; it wants to hold you, to support you, but you have to let it. You learn to relax into it and float.
Sometimes I wonder, what would life be like if we gleefully looked forward to the falls into oblivion with as much gratitude as we felt for the times when we climb higher and higher in our lives?
Crazy, right?
Maybe. Maybe not.
When my daughter drags me onto roller coasters, she doesn’t do it to torture me. She does it because she loves it. Somewhere along the way, I realized that, and it was something that felt profound. She enjoys it. All of it. Why is that?
We were riding the same ride. We were experiencing the same highs and the same death-defying drops. There was nothing subjectively different about the facts of our experience. And yet we were in fact having drastically different experiences while sitting side by side on the same ride.
She had her hands up in the air, screaming in joy, and sometimes terror, but trusting the process, fully surrendering to the experience in the moment.
I was clinging to the idea that I had some control over the process.
But… I didn’t. We never really do. This was something she innately knew. It was something that she hadn’t yet forgotten.
Watching her ride roller coasters, I remembered that there’s something inherently satisfying in just the riding of the ride. White-knuckling through doesn’t change anything. It is so obviously futile. If you can just surrender to the ride, you realize that the lows amplify the highs, the turns are confusing but exciting, and at the end, there is satisfaction is the journey, regardless of what frights it holds along the way.
Such is the joy of roller coaster riding.
Such is the joy of life.
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