The vicious cycle of good and bad

by raimperial

It almost seems that our lives are constantly subjected to balances and checks, our troughs and peaks flattened out into fine lines that stretch horizontally, irrevocably with time. It is as if there are invisible forces of nature that can sense an imbalance of sorts in our lives, fixing them by chronologically cancelling out their effects with their reciprocals, deliberately establishing a highly deterministic universe where probabilities do not and cannot work.

Good and evil, black and white, push and pull, question and answer, dead and alive. Like two sides of the same coin, the choices are limited, so much so that even if you favour one over the other, a part of your existence will inevitably gravitate towards the other side of the coin. As such, dualism appears to be an inseparable thread of life. Under such an assumption, that life cannot explicitly be either happy or sad is almost a violation of nature’s design. That a beautiful woman cannot have the intelligence of equal calibre, for it is a physical and moral transgression to have the best of both worlds. When something good happens, a bad event is almost certainly inevitable. It is as if dualism was the only structural framework of life that can exist, and so absolutely nothing else in between the two extremes could be perceived, let alone materialized. There is no spectrum, no variation, just pure opposites, which happen on an alternating fashion.

But it is during moments like this – when one good thing is immediately followed by a bad one, and becomes a cycle so vicious that it inevitably erodes a person’s sense of hope and faith – that one begins to commit the grave mistake of conflating causation and correlation, and start sliding down the obscured path between reality and make-believe, where dreams and realities transfuse into a poisonous blood that seeps through the deepest trenches of the human mind, heart, body and soul.