Think about a pendulum. It swings back and forth, back and forth. That’s all it does. If it isn’t swinging, it isn’t really a pendulum. It is just some weight at the end of a cord that hangs there. In a sense, it’s dead. A pendulum is meant to keep a stable flow and maintain a smooth arc for long periods of time. It has the ability to do more, but its purpose is to remain in a stable swing. The wider the swing, the more unstable the pendulum is… if it swings extremely wide, it risks being knocked off balance because gravity will not allow it to swing so wide.
If you’ve ever tried to go higher and higher on a swing, you’ll understand what I mean. When I was a child, we used to try to see who could go the highest on the swing. At some point in the arc, when we’re just about parallel to the ground, gravity takes hold and jolts us straight down to the ground. Now, since we’re on the swing, we don’t actually hit the ground, we just hit the end of the length of chain and swing backward again. But the ride is anything but smooth, I can tell you that.
It’s the same with your energy. If you are always looking for just that moment of being the highest, by finding something that makes you feel really good for a short period of time, then your swing will eventually reach a point of imbalance and knock you back. And since you had such a wide swing in one direction, guess what’s going to happen? You have the momentum to swing just as wide in the opposite direction.
The key is when you stop reaching for those extreme highs, you’ll stop experiencing those extreme lows. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t reach for happiness. Happiness is not an extreme. Happiness is our natural state.
Some would argue that going after the extreme high is just too enticing, that it feels too good when you reach it to give up reaching for it. If that’s your choice, then you also live with the possibility that the extreme lows you will experience as a result could be quite painful. As in the example of the swing, you could reach for that high point on the swing, and gravity could jolt you right off the swing instead of leaving you there to hang on while swinging backward. That means, you could hit the ground real hard. Sometimes, we don’t get up from that hit.
Think of an adrenaline junky. It seems they are always doing something that pushes the limits further and further. The problem is that can’t be maintained over long periods of time. You must have balance in life. And balancing highs means you must have lows. If you somehow spend a lot of time at the extreme high end of life, you MUST spend time at the extreme low. You have no choice in that fact.
You do, however, have a choice about how extreme your lows will be. You can control your pendulum swing so that you experience a very balanced high and low swing. So you’ll still experience lows, but those lows won’t be near as extreme and you’ll be more stable and able to deal with them as though they were nothing.
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