The Idea of a State of Stasis Is Silly. The Nature of Life is Chaos. Everything is Falling Apart.
Stasis, equilibrium, balance, symmetry, equality, equipoise — all our ideas about the ‘level playing field’, the state of maintenance, preservation, evenness, etc, are delusory, illusory, wrong, backwards. The default state is one of deterioration. Everything falls apart unless we attend to it — our health, muscles, finances, relationships, knowledge, worldview, contentment, morale.
That which comes closest to true stasis is subject to heroic efforts of will and astronomical amounts of money — resources that cannot be forever sustained.
Maintenance is not real; things are either getting better or getting worse. If you are not learning, studying, seeking knowledge—improving—then your brain cells are crystallising, rotting, dying. If you are not attending to your body, it is eating itself. If you are not satisfying creative inclinations, they are satisfying themselves by ravaging your mind with spicy temptations, which can make you miserable, delinquent, depressed, resentful, bitter, which can destroy your life. If you are not impressing your partner, kindling the love, communicating properly, then your relationship is nearing its expiry. If you are not making an effort, life is making an effort on you.
If you are not getting better, you are getting worse.
What makes this harder is that our default state is one of negligence, idleness, delinquency, meaninglessness, depression. If we leave things to the winds, life gets much harder—and fast. Hence, we must not only fight our personal temptations to moan, sin, indulge, binge, be idle…; we must also fight the deterioration of the order of all things in existence.
The nature of life is chaos, anarchy, a merciless maelstrom; it is the volition, discipline, striving, categorisation, judgement, power, and competency of human beings, of us, who create meaning and find order. We do this by taking responsibility and sacrificing and striving. If we don’t, down the slope we go—taking our attachments with us. Life will overwhelm, overpower, confuse, depress, squash, kill us.
Your only hope is to take responsibility; confront the truth, create meaning from chaos, fight the dragon; make sure you are getting better, everyday.
