Life's Cycle

Life is an interesting game. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Sometimes its fun, and sometimes it hurts. It cycles up, down, and all around. As one aspect gets better another one could be getting worse, better, or staying constant. As I describe life like this, I am thinking of it as a set of function to define the progression of a person moving through the world, but maybe this isn't the clearest way to view life. Perhaps life should be viewed as a movie, progressing one frame at a time, but always moving forward and always changing in one way or another. But even this, my mind tends to process as if it were in some mathematical form. I know that some people, perhaps the majority, think and philosophize about life not thinking in these terms, but I suppose I just can't shed my way of thinking.

I also find it odd that I think of life in such logical mathematical terms, thinking of everything as a set of continuous functions or statistics, but I am so prone to the influences of emotion. I think about every move I make in life, all of my decisions are calculated, yet when I look back I realize that many of my choices would have been made differently. Obviously, truly understanding the full outcome of choices that are made influences how you would make that choice again, but I put myself back in to the same situation and pretend I don't know the outcome and realize that I would have made a different choice. It is almost as if the slightest emotion is some form of intoxication, impairing my judgment and keeping me from going where I want in life.

What is even more ironic about the whole situation is that one bad choice due to emotion simply leads to more emotion and more bad choices. And thus, life is once again seen as a cycle, one giant recursive function with a chaotic nature. Before you know it, your life is out of control because whatever decision you make seems like the wrong one and it all becomes a giant series of worse and worse wrong decisions.

I suppose we occasionally get lucky though, I know I have. I have had memories, experiences, relationships, and any other form of life encapsulation, which can only be explained by luck. Statistical outliers, where we just happen to follow the right path and things seem to go our way. Sometime it makes me start to think there might actually be a higher power running the show, but even these outliers can be explained by the sciences, and in fact form much of the philosophical basis of quantum physics. Still, it is nice to think every once and a while that everything has a point, but this need for purpose is one of the greatest forces of the human condition. And with this need and its repercussions we are right back to talking about emotion.

Once again, around the cycle goes...