For as negative and upsetting  some news can be for me and how empathic I am upon hearing it, I am thankful for the emotional spectrum. For, as devastated as I can feel by loss or disappointment, as paralyzed with dread or apprehension, I have the equal and proportional ability for joy and bliss. I’ll take the trough to get the peak. I prefer not to live by the Law of averages, humming along at a steady state, never straying more than a standard of deviation from the median. It is absolutely safer to ride close to the center yellow line. Drifting onto the shoulder or detouring off road is unpredictable and dangerous. A sheer cliff face can drop precipitously into a deep crevasse. But the beauty…….oh, Lord the beauty.

The highway racing across the desert is a safe place to stay…when you are in the desert. One lane each direction. Stay on the road and you get through the desert. Bury the pedal and you get through it faster.

I’ve never been to the actual desert, but I suspect that going a few hundred feet off the asphalt on either side and the beauty will steal your breath. It can be a deadly place. You have to prepare. It is not forgiving. But the majesty and the sense of sacred cannot be denied.

Human emotions are the same.

You can stick close to midline, blunting the highs and and the lows. Augment the serotonin so as to round off the deep canyons of despair……but the trade is losing the soaring peaks. And once we all agree that ‘normal’ is near flatlined….and what was once normal human emotional spectrum is redefined as abnormal polarity that needs to be ‘managed’….we sacrifice a large measure of what makes us human.

Suffering.

We are all running from the pain and our perceived suffering. Yet….if we escape the suffering…we amputate the joy. The real passion of this life is feeling it. If you are God….why else would you become man? Seriously! He came to suffer for us? He came to suffer WITH us. But the conjoined twin of all suffering is absolute joy. Ecstasy. Bliss.

I am not advocating madness or lunacy. I am arguing that neutrality IS LUNACY.

• Sweet vs sour
• pH 3.0 vs 9.0
• Hot vs cold
• up vs down
• in vs out
• here vs there
• accepted vs rejected
• love vs hate

Apathy, indifference, neutrality are the median existences…..aimed for in an attempt to avoid what? Suffering. Yet, it also avoids joy.

I want to burn my tongue on spicy Thai food,  pucker my face with the sour lemon, yank my finger away from the hot pan of cookies, smell fresh asphalt tar in the parking lot, curl in a ball and weep with eviscerating grief, jump for joy and pump my fist in the air with victory. Neutrality doesn’t offer an escape from living, it just makes it boring as hell. The anxiety is still there, the fears, the dread, the worry. Who gives a crap. Yada yada yada. It is put one facet of living. And if you want to live…you can’t stand in the middle of the road because sure as anything, a MACK truck will plow right over you and never feel the bump-bump.

Playing it safe is a sure fire way to die fast, die inside and die without ever knowing your own potential.