I find it more than a little ironic how sometimes stress and pressure seems to ramp up from a variety of fronts and at other times stress and tension seems to die down and things feel more calm. I’m not exactly what the point of such oscillations are, but they are a facet of life that I find to be greatly intriguing. I find it intriguing as well to see just how many different ways that life can be stressful and how unusual and fortuitous the relief can find, and how sudden and unexpected it can all be as well. I’m not soure what the point of the reversals of fortune are, but life is definitely odd and unusual. I decide to enjoy life as much as possible given the circumstances.

One can often wonder what makes life so unusual and bizzare. For those of us who have patterns of life and behavior, it is always interesting to see what tends to break those patterns and set up novel and unfamiliar experiences. In those unfamiliar experiences we flail about, oscillate between the solutions we know the best, and if we are fortunate and blessed, eventually we come to realize different ways of appreciating life and the challenges it brings. By seeing beyond the shadows and familiar places of our existence we can often find ourselves richly blessed with novelty and excitement, adventure, and learning and growth. Through these experiences we learn about life beyond that which we have known before.

A great deal of life is oscilation. This is because there are usually competing pressures and tensions in our life, such that any move to one direction in a person or instition will tend to be countered by those who dislike change and want to restore the original state of equilibrium. Gradual change may endure, but sudden and drastic change will result in a counter that may partially or largely reverse the original drastic change, and may prompt further instability and oscillation. The most obvious examples of these are in cultures and nations. The nation of France, for example, has been in a state of culture war for the better part of two centuries, with hardly any respite and despite centuries of difficulties that France’s problems have caused in civil disorder and foreign disaster.

Once there is a force that pushes oscillation in a given system, it is hard for that system to find rest, as long as it is a human system, as the efforts of one side to balance will provoke hostility with other people who see their previous actions as having redressed previous unbalances. Since balance is elusive for us as human beings, it is hard for us to act in such a way that makes life balanced for ourselves and others. What we consider fair and balanced is what other people consider to be biased and partisan, and vice versa. So long as groups of people are in conflict about worldviews, then their idea of what is balanced and proper and just will be so different that they can never come to an agreement. And so our mutual provocations last over and over and over again from one crisis and conflict to another, without ceasing, until we poor souls rest in the grave and others follow us to take up the conflicts that we too inherited from previous generations over old grievances that have long since been twisted beyond all recogniton.