The |Absolute Values| of Life
- aseamster1996
- Oct 30, 2024
- 11 min read
"The great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences... To set up what you like against what you dislike is a disease of the mind." Third Zen Patriarch
While math was one of my favorite subjects growing up, I shared a common gripe with math lovers and loathers alike, "When am I ever going to apply this in real life?" The quadratic equation? Asymptotes? PEMDAS*? Even in college I barely applied any of the calculus that haunted my later high school years.
There has been one concept from high school math that has stuck with me and I try to apply it more and more on this inner journey: absolute value. If you remember, the absolute value of any positive or negative integer is the distance of the number from 0. As you can see from the example below, the absolute value of |+5| and |-5| is 5; it essentially removes the positive or negative designation.
Absolute value had admittedly been relegated way back to the section of mind where other rote memorizations go to die. Still, it reappeared a few years ago as I was starting to wake up to the fact that I was living my life like a bowling bowl. No, not the bowling ball you see a professional effortlessly deliver* down the lane as it finds the sweet spot of the oil pattern and seems to merge into the pins with a sforzando crash. My day-to-day deliveries (experiences) were altogether different. It seemed like my preferences kept me careening, and still do (albeit less than before), from one bumper to the other in a dizzying fashion (yes, the bumpers are up - I'm not a pro).
My day-to-day life seemed to go something like this:
This visual of bouncing from the positives to the negatives is also reflected in the hedonic treadmill.
The Hedonic Treadmill concept does a lovely job of explaining how we return to a baseline level of happiness between the seemingly positive and negative inflections of our lives, but I think it misses the mark a bit. For me, the curves in the graph seem to underplay just how serious we are about getting the positives and avoiding the negatives. My experience on that treadmill is in no way like the meandering nature of the curve above and instead is like the bowling ball screaming down the lane at 100 MPH as I get beaten up and bruised from both extremes.
Which brings us back to absolute value. What if there was a way we could experience the "positive" and "negative" (keep in mind that we are the ones that define both, we usually only define what we want and don't realize that by doing that we have created the opportunity for what we don't want to happen) parts of life from a different level? What if our defining events as positive and negative really stand in the way of us actually experiencing them? What would happen if we could learn to bracket the positive and negative experiences and return them to their harmless state of just experiences?
|Positive Experience| = Experience
|Negative Experience| = Experience
I must have been absent from class the day this version of absolute value was taught because like the rest of high school and school in general, our education seems to be centered around teaching us values. Literal values. Our need to focus on numbers and dates eventually balloons to other values like stressing about our SAT and ACT scores, how much money we have in the bank, or the number of degrees we have**. If we aren't careful, chasing the positives and avoiding the negatives become the absolute value of our lives.
But if we can slow down, and remove our labeling of experiences as "good" or "bad," we can return to the absolute value of life each day. Applying this concept to our lives is essentially another practice in mindfulness (becoming aware of how our relationship with our mind impacts our lives). Living this practice in as many moments as possible has increasingly helped me maintain the intention of these absolute values of life:
| Experience the moment fully and then experience whatever comes next |
| Experience the freshness of life in each moment |
| Live in peace with whatever emotions and feelings come up |
| Handle Life |
| Experience the moment fully and then experience whatever comes next |
"I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive." -Joseph Campbell
It seems that most of the time I'm not able to experience life because I'm busy trying to line everything up to be the way I think it needs to be so I can be ok. In short, I feel great when things go "my way" and I feel upset and pissed when they don't go "my way." I have found that this clinging to "my way" and trying to avoid at all costs "not my way" is THE SINGULAR REASON why I get stressed and become resistant to what is happening, aka reality.
This is by no means a new thought as many wise sages scattered throughout history have taught that the way to get the most value out of our lives, aka to experience being alive, lies in transcending our preferences. As Buddha succinctly puts it in his 2nd noble truth; the cause of suffering is preference.
While living this untethered life is much easier said than done, what's the alternative? As you probably know, trying to get life (everything out there) to line up with what we want (comprised of our limited experiences) is a full-time job that leads straight to exhaustion. How could it not?
Let's slow down and think logically about this for a second. How tiny is the way we think life should be (our preferences), created from whether an experience felt good or bad when we first experienced it, compared to all of the different ways life can be (reality)? So what are the odds that we will ever get it to be the way we want? Let's just go with extremely unlikely.
That's why we hoard the "Kodak Moments" of our life. You know, those few moments we just have to capture because they lined up perfectly (aka we hit the preference lottery) with what we wanted to happen. Not saying these experiences aren't great and we shouldn't revel in them (and appreciate the inner energy they reveal that has been there the entire time), just that we should consider whether it's worth chasing these few moments at the expense of all the rest of them.
How do we feel in those "Kodak Moments"? That's essentially the same question as, "What does it feel like to be alive?" For me, I feel most alive when the thoughts stop. Like when you're having a deep conversation with a friend and look up and 3 hours have gone by in an instant. Or you're at a concert and become one with the music and the crowd and just completely lose yourself (if we define ourselves as our thoughts and lose the thoughts then we will lose ourselves). The moments when the incessant background noise that usually colors our experience disappears and we experience whatever is happening fully are bliss .
How many moments do you think you've experienced since you've been alive vs. the total number of moments you've actually been given? No, really stop and ponder it. How many moments have you been completely open to with a curious sense of wonder vs. how many have you automatically labeled according to what has happened in the past or what should happen in the future?
We're talking about an absolute value of life that transcends the momentary hits of high or low. We are talking about an absolute value where in every moment we feel the current of life flowing in us and we acknowledge that each moment adds to our wholeness.
| Experience the freshness of life in each moment |
"I just feel like life is speeding up and it doesn't feel like it used to. I can't quite put my finger on it."
It's easy to admit that for most of us life has become a stale repetition of daily tasks that we have to do. Walk the dog. Take care of the kids. Drive to work. Sit at work for 8 hours (if we're lucky). Go grocery shopping. Get ready for bed. Do it all again the next day.
What the absolute value of life can do in these moments is loosen the predictable and routine chains that make it feel like we are drowning in a vat of "same shit different day." We will come to experience moments as new by learning to drop the negative and positive assignments. These fresh moments are what feed us instead of draining us. Would you rather eat fresh food or stale food every day? The answer is clear but we just keep eating the same stale experience day after day and wonder why life doesn't taste the way it used to (remember Campbell's quote above that we want more than anything to experience being alive).
And when life gets stale what do we do? We immediately say that we need to find a new job, a new spouse, or a new hobby. "I just need something to get the spark back," we lament to our friends. While we very well may end up doing one of these, the absolute value of life implores us to first try and fully experience what is right in front of us before making drastic outside changes (always start with adjusting "how" we're doing something before immediately trying to change "what" we're doing).
Life is imploring us to ask ourselves why our first experience of something feels powerful and special (think the first kiss, the first "I love you," having the first child, the first day of the new job) but then it somehow loses that spark as we do it more and more? It's precisely because we are laying our past labeling of each experience on top of whatever is happening in the present and so we aren't able to fully experience it as fresh and new. Give up the labels and each moment becomes enough.
| Live in peace with whatever emotions and feelings come up |
We've reached a critical juncture in the conversation of experiencing life because it might seem that I'm telling you that the absolute value of life is to just experience positive experiences/emotions. Please don't think that. Similar to music, we can't experience (wouldn't know) the treble parts without the bass parts. Experiencing life doesn't mean we are trying to solely experience the "high notes" (how boring would music be without all the interval variations that take us on musical journeys), but that we reach a point where we experience them all without running from any.
As Eckhart Tolle says, "Even if everything were to collapse and crumble all around you, you would still feel a deep inner core of peace. You may not be happy, but you will be at peace." Peace is that which transcends the seemingly negative and positive events in our lives. It really is possible to feel at peace when we're sad, upset, or angry. Again, experiencing life means we get to experience each emotion to the fullest. It's just that when it's over outside, it's over inside. But that's not the case now.
In our current state, we aren’t able to move on because we are weighed down by the lifetime of negatives and positives we have stored in an attempt to control the outside. This dream state is one where the unchangeable past we are anxious about and the unknowable future we worry about causes us to miss the miracle of each moment right in front of us. We become light and free when we drop the negative and positive designations we have attached to life and experience life as just life.
Living this way we can experience life instead of just experiencing our belief that something should be happening, should happen again, or should not be happening.
| Ability to handle life |
What the Absolute Value of life ultimately comes down to is whether we can handle life. What does it mean to handle life? It means to be ok and at peace with whatever happens and realize that we can learn from it all. Otherwise, we default to a life of manipulation and forced control where we live every second trying to get things to line up with how we want them to be. If we slow down and look at the paradox we have put ourselves in it becomes clear that when we define our likes and dislikes we are defining our boundaries. As these boundaries get tighter and tighter we can get increasingly distrustful of anything new happening. The NEW is LIFE!
This is exactly what the Stoics taught. One of my favorite Stoicism writers is Ryan Holiday and he produces the Daily Stoic Email. I remember one such email where he shared a quote from Epicteus (a well-known figure in Stoicism - a slave who discovered internal freedom through being externally controlled):
“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own . . .”
This should be comforting news! While the outside is completely out of our control (something we know deep down but is much harder to acknowledge day-to-day), we can work to find inner freedom that transcends what is happening outside.
Both Stoicism and the Absolute Value of Life are trying to remind us that while what happens externally is out of our control, we can always have the last say about what is happening inside. Epictetus also said, “Every event has two handles. One by which it can be carried, and one by which it can’t." To handle life means that we choose to carry it from the open perspective that I'm entering a new moment and while I don't know what is going to happen I commit to being ok and learning from whatever happens.
Living the absolute values of life mentioned above won't be easy to start as it will require re-wiring patterns and habits that we've been fortifying since we were children. But it is absolutely within our capability to rewrite the script. We will rewrite the script one experience at a time. We will remind ourselves moment after moment to come back to the now, that this is a fresh and brand new experience, that we can fully experience whatever emotions arise, and that we can ultimately handle life.
If we do this enough we will find absolute value in each moment and will reach the state of equanimity described by Caroline Myss:
“My job is to get to a point where neither abundance nor poverty scares me. Where neither being married or alone scares me. My job is not to pray for one of those states, but to recognize that no matter what state I’m in I’ll be fine. So that no matter what God gives you, whether you find yourself in the most wonderful relationship or you find yourself alone, either way you say this is ok, I can handle this. Whether you find yourself wondering where your next meal is coming from or you find yourself rolling in loot, you say to yourself, "Either way, God, the challenge is the same." You’re asking me how do I manage myself and you’re watching my response to this and that’s what counts.” Spiritual Madness by Carolina Myss
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