Everything Leaves At The Same Speed
At a show on his Solo Tour, John Mayer said, “I’ve realized everything you love and hate leaves at the same speed … The thing you hate that you have to do tomorrow will be over before you know it, and the thing you’re looking forward to tomorrow will be over before you know it.” Things that come and go, rise and fall, tip to one side and then the other, tide out and tide in, at the same speed—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
The Pain-Pleasure Balance
There’s a neural truth to John’s realization—that “everything you love and hate leaves at the same speed.” In her book Dopamine Nation, Dr. Anna Lembke writes, “One of the most remarkable neuroscientific findings in the past century is that the brain processes pleasure and pain in the same place. Further, pleasure and pain work like opposite sides of a balance.” “And one of the overriding rules governing this balance,” she said, “is that it wants to stay level…With any deviation from neutrality, the brain will work very hard to restore a level balance—what scientists call ‘homeostasis.’ … With any stimulus to one side, there will be a tip of an equal and opposite amount to the other side.” Pain and pleasure, good days and bad days, the things you hate that you have to do tomorrow and the things you’re looking forward to—everything leaves at the same speed.
The Tide Is Just Out
I wrote recently about how the singer-songwriter Jewel was able to reduce the frequency and the intensity of stress- and anxiety-induced thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations by learning to reinterpret them as informative indicators. Of course, sometimes, no amount of reinterpreting or revaluing seems to make stress or anxiety go away. Once, experiencing something distinctly worse than stress or anxiety in that the painful thoughts and emotions seemed unusually permanent, Jewel took a walk. At a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, she sat down. “I sat there for about 8 hours,” Jewel said. “I watched the tide go out and then come back. It happened so slowly, so imperceptibly, that I didn’t notice it until, at the end of 8 hours, I was like, ‘Holy smokes, the tide went out a mile and came in a mile.’ And that changed my life. Because I felt so sad, and I felt like my sadness would be forever. But when I watched that tide take all that time to come in and out, it dawned on me that the culmination of nature, of physics, is change. And since I’m part of nature and of physics, it would be impossible for my bad mood not to change. It would be outside of physics for it not to change. It would be arrogant to suppose that I alone existed outside the laws of nature and physics. That realization suddenly changed my whole perception…Still, whenever I get sad, depressed, stressed, anxious—I say to myself, ‘the tide is just out, and I don’t know how long it will take, but it has to come back in because nothing is permanent.’”
Tonight, I Will Be In My Bed
In 2009, Chris Sacca rode his bike across the country. He rode 100 miles a day for 34 straight days. It was a charity event organized by the company Trek Travel, and since Chris was asked and agreed to participate with short notice, he writes, “I was fat and definitely not in riding shape.” He expected that the first few days would be brutal, but then, that he would gradually build up endurance and find his rhythm. “However,” Chris writes, “I completely failed to assess how mentally and emotionally draining this ride would prove to be…Each morning, I would wake up before dawn, and venture out into temperatures below freezing, knowing that I would be on my bike for another eight hours.” To get through, “I had a phrase I kept repeating in my head over and over again, which was, ‘Tonight, I will be in my bed. Tonight, I will be in my bed. Tonight, I will be in my bed.’ . . . It was something I repeated to remind me that the pain of what I was going through was temporary and that, no matter what, at the end of that day, I would be in my bed that night.” It was a reminder that, no matter what, he would soon get to spend an equal amount of time in his bed.
The Secret Wisdom of Nature
While trees require sunlight to grow, the strongest and longest-living trees don’t get much sunlight during their early years. Instead, they spend their first few decades “waiting patiently in their mothers’ shade,” Peter Wohlleben explains in The Secret Wisdom of Nature. Limited sunlight leads to slow growth. Slow growth leads to the development of dense, long-lasting wood. Youngsters without any shade, on the other hand, grow fast and therefore develop wood that is airy and susceptible to fungi, yeasts, molds, and mildews. So, Wohlleben writes, “A tree that grows quickly rots quickly and therefore never has a chance to grow old.”
The Half Life Theory
The venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya has a theory about company value creation: “The faster you build it, that is the half life: it will get destroyed in the same amount of time.” Things tend to come and go, tip to one side and then the other, tide out and back in, grow and then rot, get created and destroyed, at the same speed.