Life has been, to say the least, very interesting to me recently. A healthy dose of happiness, a substantial offering of stress, and a hell of a cocktail of unpredictability. But these life experiences have led me to where I am today, and by experiencing them I have grown stronger than I ever thought I had the capability to. For a long time, I was convinced that reason was the solution to life. And for another time, I was convinced that pure feeling was the solution. But neither of these are entirely true, and I keep coming back to this idea, present in almost every religion and spiritual practice: moderation. I once believed that the heart and the mind were bound to battle one another, engaging in an endless, confusing, and completely fruitless war. But this is not the case at all. In fact, the mind and heart are not enemies, but rather two partners that may dance together beautifully if you allow them to. If you allow both your mind and heart to find synthesis, and you make a balance
Primitive humans, through their lived experience, lived lives that were wholly satisfying: they engaged in work that was meaningful and personal, they had constant challenges and mental stimulation, an unrestricted sense of autonomy, and a sense of adventure belying the entire thing. Humans had no choice but to derive meaning from a life that was exhilarating at every moment. Every choice was meaningful and required an unparalleled trust in one’s ability to overcome the next obstacle. It was an enduring but highly satisfying test to see if you had what it took to have mastery over life. And in our chase toward rapid industrialization, we have lost the personal touch of what it means to be human. Many of the activities we engage in are indeed surrogates for that which were once accomplished and deemed satisfying by primitive man. Take video games or movies, for example. One engages in adventurous, dramatic, action-packed, or otherwise exhilarating genres to induce pleasure in oneself.