A Mason's Work

We talk a lot about the positive and negative aspects of life as you live and grow and learn

new things.

When you look at these kind of polarities, it's one thing to kind of simply suggest that

there are ups and downs, right?

You have ups and downs in your life.

This is a normal occurrence.

It's kind of a level two understanding to know that there is perhaps not just ups and

downs, not just positive and negatives, but the fact that there is a potential causal

relationship in these things.

The negative times in your life create the foundation for positive times to emerge.

As you begin pursuing that even further and looking in the natural world, you'll find

that these cycles are pretty common, that we are perpetually in this kind of evaluative

mode where we're looking at our conscious experience and evaluating it positively or negatively,

and as a result, of course, correcting the negative, right, and trying to enhance the

positive.

One of the perils with this conceptually is that underneath that understanding is the

inherent attempt to try and create a one-sided coin where all of the things are going to be

good all of the time.

You can't do that, obviously.

There's no such thing as a one-sided coin.

There's actually not even anything as such a thing as a two-sided coin.

Because minimally, have three sides, right?

When you kind of pursue that understanding a little bit further, you begin to realize

that the mechanics of growth and development require all three sides of that coin or all

sorts of the interpretive analyses of the experiences of daily life.

You need those positive moments.

If you're developing along a trajectory, what will happen as you grow and improve today's

positive moments will become essentially the negative moments of your future.

You will raise the overall baseline as you improve to get to better outcomes over repeated

sort of cycles of this developmental path.

As you do this, your day-to-day experience should increase in both sort of quality and

depth.

The frequency of those negative experiences, as you get more adept at handling the painful

elements of everyday life, you will be better enabled to have more of a positive experience.

Additionally, when you start looking at what it means to have sort of the good life or

a happy life, independent of kind of a moral definition of that which I'll leave to you

and your faith, when you look at the way it feels to live a good life, the emotional content

of that, it's important to understand a little bit about how the dynamics of that works.

So as you are sort of going through your everyday life, trying to kind of mitigate the suffering

that you're experiencing, the emotions that arise or emerge from your day-to-day life

are essentially a constellation of feelings.

Those feelings as they arise will tend to cluster in certain sort of, let's say, domains

or genres.

One of those is we'll call happy.

So this is the cluster of happy emotions.

It's joy, it's wonder, it's delight, it's bubble-bub.

You're going to have a cluster of potentially negative emotions when you're not having a happy

part of time in your life.

They may be fear, anxiety, doubt, uncertainty, anger, any of those kinds of expressions that

arise in the moment and are a direct result of the way you're processing the suffering

you're experiencing.

So when you or the pain you're experiencing more accurately because suffering is a little

bit different, but when you start working through these things and start trying to design

a life that matters, it's going to be important for you to understand at least structurally

kind of how these relationships are formed.

And instead of perhaps running from the suffering or even embracing the suffering as an opportunity

for growth, understanding there's a cyclical nature to these things, you might find yourself

designing your next adversity with intent so that you can create even better and stronger

outcomes.

And what does that look like?

That looks like choosing to go through the adversity of perhaps a physical fitness regime

or regimen or the process of learning a new mechanical skill or the process of learning

a new intellectual skill or a language or things like that.

So as you go through these kind of like selectively choosing those adversities you're going

to experience, you can selectively at the same time narrow the possible range of positive

experiences to kind of put limits and parameters around what that experience might be like.

And as you're working on constructing the quality life, understand that you have choices

not just on the kind of pain that you expose yourself to, but also the range of the positive

experiences that you're trying to create.