What happens when we lose the rhythm?
A dip in the road does not mean the road is bad. It just means it’s a road.
Zest for life, for work, for relationships, for the upcoming trip, for the new hobby inevitably wanes. The big idea, which we worshipped one day we weary of the next. The project that flourished at the outset flounders midway. And the opposite is true too. Life waxes full. After months of bad dates — suddenly a flame. After a year of denials, an acceptance.
This is the pattern of so much of life. But we seem to forget it, or resent what C.S. Lewis called the Law of Undulation – the fact that our moods (and lives in general) follow a predictable pattern of rise and fall, of up and down. They’re not static. They’re rhythmic, wavy; they ebb and flow.
But we can miss the flow. When life is rosy, and the world is a song, and we’re floating from bliss to bliss — we tend to be blind to any pattern at all. We’re living in the moment. We have the world on a string.
It’s natural to bookmark this feeling, and to be glad for it; the trouble comes when we refuse to come down from our perch, when we cling desperately to the dulcet mood, hoping to string it out indefinitely and make it the new standard of our life.
When it passes — and it must — we feel robbed. Our minds fret and fidget with a hundred reasons for the apparent decline: Have I lost my passion? Am I getting boring? Do I need to change jobs again? We second guess ourselves and become very existential. We are sure something went wrong, when really nothing may be wrong and a great deal may be right.
If we’ve lost the sense of rhythm it’s tempting to want to Botox our souls: to isolate the high and smiley moments and let the rest sag.
I think there’s an alternative. In part 2, I’ll hash this idea out some more, but I think it begins with a simple picture. My hunch is that when we embrace rhythm we live well, and when we resist it we live less well. Here’s to catching waves…
show & tell 