Perhaps we are alone in the universe after all

The more I encountered the concept of the elements early on in my acupuncture studies, the more I became fascinated by the idea that the same energies which create the universe also created me and will continue to go on giving me life until the day I die.  As acupuncturists we are not always aware in our everyday work with the elements as we treat our patients that these elements are symbols for universal aspects of cosmic life.  I have therefore always been intrigued to realise how much this understanding of the work I do forces me to confront the deepest of life’s mysteries.  This has led me to the belief that each of us can be seen as a tiny thought in the mind of whatever god or universal force we believe ultimately created the universe.

I am therefore always thrilled when a little more light is shed into the deepest of life’s mysteries, where science tries to make sense of how human life appeared and, even more mysteriously, why it appeared in the form it has done.  So here is a further offering to my curiosity from the Guardian a few days ago with the headline: “Perhaps we are alone in the universe after all”.  The article describes a paper written by three Oxford University philosophers in which they surmise that “the probability (is) that we are alone in our galaxy, and perhaps in the universe…. There is quite probably no one out there to rescue or to care about us.  What happens to our species is in our hands alone.  We had better get on with it.”

This has prompted me to look up some other quotations I had collected over the years on much the same subject.  Some are by Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, in which he says, in lovely poetic language:

 

“We are composed of the language of the universe”
“I think it’s only life which gives the universe any meaning.”

 

And, most memorably:

 

“Perhaps it could be said that the universe was made for Man”.

 

Finally, in an article about Leonardo da Vinci, the writer, an art historian, said the following:

 “I once heard a scientist remark that perhaps the principal function of mankind was to bear witness to the universe, to be here precisely to see in the night sky the light of long dead stars, and in so doing to give completion and meaning.”

 

All these are profound thoughts for us all to ponder on.  But I don’t think we can understand the potential power of what we do as we harness the energies of the elements through our needles to help our patients if we ignore the deeper implications of our practice.

 

A little Pre-Christmas serendipity*

A few happy or odd things which I am drawing together into a pre-Christmas blog to cheer myself (and I hope others) up:

First:  An article in today’s Guardian newspaper with the heading:  “After this week, I no longer see Brexit as unstoppable”  (Hoorah, I said to myself)

Second: A lovely quotation about growing old by an American poet I have only just heard about, called Jorie Graham:

"You have to be ready for the late work.  Make sure you develop a toolkit that's wide enough for every middle stage and especially for the end...

I am living in the late season, but it has its songs, too”

 I like to think that I, too, am living in my late season, and I hope that my late season “has its songs, too”.

Third:  (and a most stupid, and therefore laughably funny advert, noticed on an estate agent’s window):  “Find your happy”, it said.

Who on earth came up with this ridiculous wording?  “Find your happy what?”  If it had said something like “Find your happy home”, that would have been a bit more understandable, although not very much so, but as it is, it has puzzled me every time I pass the estate agent on the bus, as I do nearly every day.  I wondered whether I should go in and ask them to explain what the advert means, but then decided there are more important things to do with my time.

 

*Dictionary definition:  The faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident.

Our body is a sacred landscape

I have come across two individual pieces of writing which in their different ways both describe the mystery which is at the heart of human life, and underpins my practice of five element acupuncture.

The first has provided the title for this blog.  It is taken from a podcast by Heiner Fruehauf on the Classical Chinese Medicine website https://classicalchinesemedicine.org/your-body-sacred-landscape/, which I listened to some time ago.

The second is from a blog by my young friend Sujata Varadarajan, who writes beautifully about her life in India and her yoga practice at http://sujatavaradarajan.blogspot.co.uk/   In her latest blog she says:

“Now that I have begun focussing on my inner energy, I find myself unconsciously sensing the energy given out by the environment as well - in particular nature.  Not in discrete units but in a fuzzy kind of way, feeling the difference between the energy of water and land, of grass and granite, of raindrops and wet earth.

I feel an immense gratitude towards all the traditional, wise systems which recognized this energy, and devised unusual ways to work with it - in particular the systems I have come in contact with - Yoga, Five Element Acupuncture and Tai Chi Chuan.  It's a magical feeling to be linked to everything through something so basic yet intangible, and to be able to tap it and use it wisely.”

I love the thought that our bodies are sacred landscapes, and therefore that we always have to be aware that with each treatment we are being invited by our patients to enter a sacred space, and must do so sensitively and humbly.  And equally, how lovely it is that we are privileged to enjoy “the magical feeling” that “we are linked to everything” and are able, through our practice, to “tap it”, and, we hope, “use it wisely”.

Thank you, Heiner and Sujata, for putting thoughts so close to my heart into such beautiful words.

 

Simple can be harder than complex

I came across this quote from the Apple’s founder, Steve Jobs, in a Guardian article a few days ago:

“Simple can be harder than complex,” he said. “You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.  But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

This echoes what I like about being a five element acupuncturist.  One of my catchphrases when talking about my work is “the simpler the better”.  We certainly do have to work hard for quite a few years to get to the stage where we understand what it means to practise in the simplest, purest way possible.  This was a skill which JR Worsley so beautifully mastered and passed on through his teaching to us, his pupils.

I found it amusing and ironic, though, that the article in which I found this quote was entitled “We are at the mercy of devices we don’t understand”.  It was all about how incredibly complex the latest version of the i-phone which the writer had just bought had become, so that he ended up losing much of his stored data because he could not understand all the hidden instructions embedded in it.  This seemed to be hardly the kind of “simple device” which Steve Jobs had worked so hard to get his company to create.

But I like to think that our simple treatments can indeed move mountains.

 

 

Measuring life with coffee spoons

It is with delight that I come across pieces of writing which make me laugh because of their rightness.  I heard two such this week, one after the other in the space of a few hours, and here they are.

 

The first came during a day’s reading of TS Eliot poems on the BBC.  One of his lines reads:

 

“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”.

 

The second was something I heard the art critic, John Berger, saying, when he was talking about writing, and which formed part of the TV obituary on his death a few days ago: 

 

“(Writing) helps me make sense of things.”

 

Both sayings resonate deeply with me.  As people who know me will recognize, I, too, appear to measure out my life with the coffee spoons I use to stir the many espressos I like to drink in the many different coffee houses around London in which I do my thinking and my writing.

 

And writing, which is something I have found I have to do, does indeed “help me make sense of things”.  It helps me make sense not only of my work as acupuncturist, but of my life in general.

 

So it is with great joy that I welcome these two quotations into my collection of sayings that enrich my life.

 

Two more quotes about the Wood and Metal elements

Sometimes I come across very appropriate quotations about the elements in books that I read.  I like to collect these.  Here are two more, one about the Wood element and the other about the Metal element, both from a book by Helen Dunmore called The Spell in Winter:

Wood quote:

“I was bad at anger;  I’d always been bad at anger.  There was something pitiful in Miss Gallagher which muddled me.”

I, too, have always been "bad at anger".  That doesn't mean that I don't get angry.  I certainly do.  But my anger leaves a strong aftertaste in me which it takes me a long time to get rid of.  It is as though I am ashamed of feeling this emotion.  The "something pitiful" which the protagonist in this book feels is something which resonates with me, because I also tend to find quite legitimate excuses for the behaviour in people that has provoked my anger.

Metal quote:

“You live backwards as if there’s no tomorrow.”

I think this is a very acute observation of some aspects of the way in which Metal people live their lives, looking backwards and judging a past that is behind them.  I think that Wood, on the other hand, would like always  to "live forwards as if there will be no past".

Another beautiful quotation

I love unexpectedly coming across beautiful writing.  The quote below is from a book by Alexandra Fuller, who writes about her life in Africa.  All her books are worth reading, not only for what they tell us about a life lived through some of the turmoil of African independence wars, but also for the beauty of the words she uses to describe this life.

Here is a little gem which makes me understand, once again, why books are so important to me, and how they have the ability to transport me, as here, into the mysteries of the universe.

“The lion lay next to Mapenga, contentedly licking fish flesh off the edge of Mapenga’s plate, and we talked softly about other nights when we had sat around fires in Africa – with different people – listening to wild lions, or hyenas, or to the deep, singing, anonymous night.  Above us the sky tore back in violent, endless beauty, mysterious and unattainable.  There is no lid to this earth and there is nothing much fettering us to the ground.  Eventually we will die and be wafted back into the universe.  Bones to dust.  Flesh to ashes.  Soul into that infinite mystery.”

Alexandra Fuller:  Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier, p. 232

 

 

Each of our lives should make a difference

I love coming across inspiring words.  The ones I have just read are from an interview with Bianca Jagger in today’s Guardian newspaper.  And if you want a good example of the Metal element, then you can also learn more about this element by looking at her photo (and presumably catch up with her on Youtube).

She has always been a great fighter against injustices wherever she finds them, a woman really to be admired.  The article finishes with these words from her:  “”Sometimes I say I work too much, I travel too much, I need a rest.  But I’m glad that I’m doing this.  I don’t think I would be happy to have a life of leisure.”

The interviewer then asks her what she hopes her legacy will be.  When she speaks, her eyes start to well up.  “I hope I was able to make a difference.  That’s all we can hope for.  That I can look back and say I tried.”

We should all emulate Bianca Jagger in ensuring that some aspect of our life “has made a difference”.  This does not mean it has to make a huge, or a public difference, as her life has done in many areas.  The importance is for each life to have had its own moments of significance, of having made some slight difference to the world, of having changed something, however small, for the better.  This is what I hope from my own life.

 

 

Two more interesting quotes

I love collecting quotations which open my mind to new thoughts.  Here are two more, one from the detective writer, Michael Dibdin, and the other from an American author, Vivian Gornick, I know absolutely nothing about.  I don’t think I have read her book, which is apparently an autobiography, but I must have found the quotation tucked away somewhere.  I love the idea of “driving into a vast darkness” when I am reading a book which reveals a new side of human nature to me.

 

Michael Dibdin: A Long Finish

 

“You couldn’t be sure of doing the right thing.  All you could hope for, perhaps, was to do the wrong thing better, or at least more interestingly."

 

 

Vivian Gornick:  Fierce Attachments

 

“For Davey, reading was a laser beam – narrow, focused, intent – driving into a vast darkness.”

 

 

When words are not enough

A reader of my blog asked me to explain one of the quotations with which I like to litter this blog. This was the line from a book by Elizabeth von Arnim in which she wrote, “With this thing of chiffon she tried to protect herself from the eternities” (my blog of 25 June 2011).  What did I think this meant?  I did not know how to answer her, because I couldn’t myself put into words what I felt its meaning was, or why I felt so drawn to it.  This happens often to me, usually when I am reading poetry, but, as here, novels, too.

This called to mind something I read in a book on poetry by the broadcaster Clive James, himself a very good poet.  He said that he often did not himself really understand what a certain line in a poem meant, but that that was part of its mystery.  I, too, often don’t fully understand the words I am reading, though some, those that I like to write about, resonate with something within me, as if they evoke a deeper meaning than mere words can convey.  This is what the quotation my blog reader asked about does to me, as does another line, this time of poetry, which reverberates deep within me each time I read it.  This is the line from a John Clare poem (see my blog of 29 January 2015), “I am the self-consumer of my woes”. Even though I am not sure what this means, I think that I understand it at a level deeper than words of mine can explain.  And for everybody certain poems evoke this deeper resonance, without their maybe quite understanding what this is.  I like to think that these words reach us laden with some touch of the eternal.

And this also reminds me of Pascal’s words, which echo within me each time I look at the night sky:  “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinies m’effraye” (the eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me).   We could also call these “eternal spaces” the Dao into which we disappear at our death, far-distant spaces which we can regard as terrifying, but also awesome and inspiring.  I think that they must provide the inspiration behind all great art.  For what exalts us inevitably at some level can also terrify us.

"Music is no more than a decoration of silence"

I have just been to a lovely series of concerts by students at the Royal Academy of Music here in London, hearing some of the most beautiful playing of music that I have heard for a long time.  There was one particular young Polish pianist, Martyna Kazmierczak, who enthralled me with the joy with which she played.  In her introduction to her pieces, she quoted an anonymous 15^th century composer who apparently said that “music is no more than a decoration of silence”.

Somehow this resonated deeply with me, and set me thinking about my own work.  It made me wonder whether the same profound thought, slightly adapted, could not also apply to what I do.  Could one perhaps say that the span of human life, which can be seen as akin to a piece of music from its start, our birth, to its completion, our death, is indeed no more than a decoration of silence, an illustration of the Dao?.  We all emerge from the vast silence of the Dao, live the span of our life, and then disappear again into the vast silence of the Dao at our death.  It feels good to me to be able to say that what I do is then no more than a “decoration of silence”, and that by my work I make the silence of the Dao within each of my patients slightly deeper and slightly more pure.

 

 

"The truth is always kept in a far place"

Somebody, I don’t remember who now, gave me this lovely quotation which haunts me, though I’m not sure exactly what it means: “The truth is always kept in a far place”.  The words have a lovely ring to them, and awake in me an image of a far-distant land with at its centre a lovely picture of Truth, who I see as a graceful woman presiding over this far country.  Perhaps the reason the words affect me so much now has something to do with my latest visit to a far-distant land, that of China, for my seventh visit there a week or so ago, though why should I be thinking of truth residing there?

Probably this is because in some ways it is truth which I discover each time I return there, the truth of what I have dedicated the second half of my life to, this discipline of mine called five element acupuncture.  For each visit strengthens my conviction of the deep truths about the human condition underlying what I do.  Somehow in China these truths become ever more evident to me, because of the speed at which my Chinese students so quickly understand what I teach them and unquestioningly accept the fundamentals of five element practice as though they are absolutely self-evident to them.  It is rare for those I have taught in the UK and Europe to reach such an instinctive and profound understanding as rapidly as do the Chinese. To us Europeans they are at first in what seems to be a foreign language, which it takes us much time to understand, whilst to the Chinese they are familiar concepts underlying all their lives.

I have been privileged to be invited by Professor Liu Lihong into this (geographically) “far place” in a way which still surprises me for its rightness at this stage of my life.  Each visit to China strengthens my bonds to my students over there and reinforces my gratitude for being given such a gift.

To Professor Liu and the 80 students who sat enthralled in our classes as they gained insights into something which for them is often a new discipline of acupuncture, I send my thanks for the happy time we spent together.  And these thanks I also pass on to Long Mei and Guy Caplan who shared this seventh step on my journey to China so creatively with me.

I am sure I heard this quotation from somebody whilst I was in China last November.  Perhaps one of those reading this blog over there will tell me who it was.

A beautiful poem

I am not a natural reader of poems.  I have always found that I need to hear somebody reading them to me before I really understand their rhythm.  But I have just been introduced by a poetry-writing friend to a poem by John Clare (1793-1864), one line of which has haunted me ever since.  It is the third line of the poem, and I have decided that it will be good to exercise my brain by trying to learn the whole, quite short poem.

The line is from a poem called simply “I am”, and here are its first three lines, written down, to my delight already, from memory:

“I am, yet what I am none cares or knows;

My friends forsake me like a memory lost:

I am the self-consumer of my woes"

(I got a few words wrong!)

I don’t know why these lines swirl away in my mind as much as they do.  I suppose that this is one of the secrets of good poetry.  Its rhythms and its juxtapositions of oddly-assorted words lead us away from the everyday into some distant realm of the spirit. "I am the self-consumer of my woes" speaks to me in a way I don’t really understand, but simply feel.

He was completely self-taught, working as a labourer in the fields to support his family, and then unhappily spent the last years of his life consigned to an asylum.  I have just discovered that “I am” was the last poem he wrote.  He must indeed have felt that his friends had forsaken him “like a memory lost”, so that he had to become “the self-consumer of his woes”. 

Reading about his life, and its unhappy ending, I can at last begin to understand the meaning of these lines

New words of wisdom

I like to collect wise sayings, and today, to my delight, I have come across two, both of which have taught me something new.

Here they are:

“I’m getting angrier as I get older”, said by the artist, Cornelia Parker.

And a quotation from Tolstoy:

“We can know only that we know nothing.  And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”

The first, by Cornelia Parker, echoes something which I have only just become aware of, my own increasing sense of anger at the inequalities of this world.  I only have to think of those rich people gathering in Davos now, all flying in with their private jets, and most of whom, I expect, live in gated communities to keep the starving hordes at bay, for this sense of anger within me to well over into a kind of fury that the poor and disadvantaged are expected to make sacrifices whilst the rich just add to their financial portfolios.

And, seen from the point of view of a five element acupuncturist, the Tolstoy quotation is an excellent reminder to me of something I always want to emphasize in my teaching.  With every patient we see we must always start from a position of absolute humility, of “knowing nothing”, because each is unique and teaches us something completely new.

I will leave my readers to decide whether either of these quotations resonate for them as they do for me. 

Good Wood quote from Anna Karenina

You could not have a better description of the qualities of the Wood element than that from this passage which I came across when reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in my hotel room in China.

“Spring is the time of plans and projects.  And as he came out into the farmyard, Levin, like a tree n spring that knows not what form will be taken by the young shoots and twigs imprisoned in its swelling buds, hardly knew what undertakings he was going to begin upon now in the farm work that was so dear to him.  But he felt that he was full of the most splendid plans and projects.”

Good Wood quotes

I have looked through the list of quotations illustrating the Wood element which I gave our SOFEA students;  I am offering them here to my blog readers:


"She felt like a bulb must feel, she thought, at the supreme moment when it has nosed its little spear successfully up through the mould it has endured all the winter and gets it suddenly out into the light and the splendour of the world.  The freedom of it!  The joy of getting clear.” 
                                                                                        Elizabeth von Arnim: The pastor’s wife


The essential thing was to plot my next move.  But that was precisely what gave me the most trouble, the thing I could no longer do.  I had lost the ability to think ahead, and no matter how hard I tried to imagine the future, I could not see it, I could not see anything at all.  The only future that had ever belonged to me was the present I was living in now, and the struggle to remain in that present had gradually overwhelmed the rest.  I had no ideas anymore.  The moments unfurled one after the other, and at each moment the future stood before me as a blank, a white page of uncertainty.”
                                                                                                        Paul Auster: Moon Palace


"He was an old man, and he hated the snow.  Pushing on toward the river, he seemed to see in the storm the mortality of the planet.  Spring would never come again.  The valley of the West River would never again be a bowl of grass and violets.  The lilacs would never bloom again.  Watching the snow blow over the fields, he knew in his bones the death of civilizations - Paris buried in the snow, London abandoned, and in the caves of the escarpment at Innsbruck a few survivors huddled over a fire of chair and table legs.  This cruel, this dolorous, this Russian winter, he thought;  this death of hope.  Cheer, valor, all good feelings had been extinguished in him by the cold.  He tried to cast the hour into the future, to invent some gentle thaw, some clement southwest wind - blue and moving water in the river, tulips and hyacinths in bloom, the plump stars of a spring night hung about the tree of heaven - but he felt instead the chill of the glacier, the ice age, in his bones and in the painful beating of his heart.”
                                                                                       John Cheever:  The Wapshot Scandal

“It is ever so with the things that Men begin:  there is a frost in Spring, or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise.”

“Yet seldom do they fail of their seed,” said Legolas.  “And that will lie in the dust and rot to spring up again in times and places unlooked-for.”
                                                                                  J.R.R. Tolken: The Return of the King

“He was one of those sticklers for form who in every possible circumstance know the appropriate regulation, and are able to discuss it impersonally and accept it without question.”

                                                                                           Boris Pasternak: Dr Zhivago
 

“Mrs Thatcher has not come to terms with her abrupt departure from office last November.... Her interviewer says she appeared “a woman disoriented”.  Mrs Thatcher told her: “The pattern of my life was fractured.  It is like throwing a pane of glass with a complicated map upon it on the floor.”

                                                                                                  From a newspaper interview

 
And the following were things some of the things my Wood patients told me:

 "The world’s at your feet, but I have a total sense of lack of direction.  I feel rootless.”

“Damaged roots become warped maturity.”

 “All this abundance - I would like to get it into order.”  (A patient talking about spring)

 “It’s like living with somebody in forward motion all the time.” (A girl about her Wood boyfriend)

 

 

                                                                         

 

 

 

 

Good Earth quotes

I have always liked writing down particularly relevant quotes about the different elements in the books I read.  The first quote is from an excellent book I have just finished reading by Jacqueline Winspear, who usually writes detective stories based around the time of the first world war, but this time has written a very moving story of a family and friends who volunteer to go to the battlefields in Belgium.  This is a very appropriate subject for a book at the time of the centenary of this completely tragic and pointless war.


“Thea was aware of Kezia, nodding her understanding.  She remembered a certain look, from the very early days of their friendship.  Kezia would often take her time with a question, ruminating over it in her mind, chewing on it like a cow with a clump of grass, grinding it down from side to side to get the goodness – only with Kezia, it was as if she were looking for something in the middle of the problem.  The truth, perhaps.”

        Jacqueline Winspear: The Care and Management of Lies

 

I also list below some of the quotes I used to give my students at SOFEA as a way of helping them understand the Earth element better:

“What Anna most longed for in the days that followed was a mother.  “If I had a mother,” she thought, not once, but again and again, and her eyes had a wistful, starved look when she thought of it, “if I only had a mother, a sweet mother all to myself, of my very own, I’d put my head on her dear shoulder and cry myself happy again.  First I’d tell her everything, and she wouldn’t mind however silly it was, and she wouldn’t be tired however long it was, and she’d say, “Little darling child you are only a baby after all,” and would scold me a little, and kiss me a great deal, and then I’d listen so comfortably, all the time with my face against her nice soft dress, and I would feel so safe and sure and wrapped round whilst she told me what to do next.  It is lonely and cold and difficult without a mother.”

                                                                       Elizabeth von Arnim:  The Benefactress

 “He was one of those monstrous fat men you sometimes pass in a crowd: no matter how hard you struggle to avert your eyes, you can’t help gawping at him.  He was titanic in his obesity, a person of such bulging, protrusive roundness that you could not look at him without feeling yourself shrink.  It was though his three-dimensionality was more pronounced than that of other men.  Not only did he occupy more space than they did, but he seemed to overflow it, to ooze out from the edges of himself and inhabit areas where he was not.!

                                                                        Paul Auster: Moon Palace

"I thought of life as work.  You have a certain amount of time given to you and you have to find dedication, passion, concentration.  You have to cultivate yourself and be fruitful very much like a patch of land.”

                                                                        Jeanne Moreau, actress: interview

What Earth patients have told me:

“I felt as though the rug had been pulled from under me.”

“I feel the ground a bit firmer beneath me.”

“I always like having a sense of being right at the hub of everything.”

“I don’t think I should always ask other people to feed me.”

“I feel very ungrounded.”

“I feel supported.”

“Everything’s been wiped away from under my feet.”

 

 

 

A lovely quote by Nietzsche

I love finding little snippets of other people’s thoughts which illuminate my life.  Here’s one from the German philosopher, Nietzsche, which I found in, of all things, a detective story:


“It’s better to regret what you have done than what you never did.”


This is a profoundly Metal thought.  The life of those of the Metal element revolves around their deep need to assign to things their true value, and has as its necessary accompaniment the regret they may feel if they do not assess things correctly.

It's never too late......

I came across this quotation in a book I was reading.  “It’s never too late to be what you ought to have been.”  It was attributed to the writer, George Eliot. 

I like this very much, and it chimes with some of the thoughts I have been having.  We should all live our lives with the thought that today may be our last day, and, if it is, have we been, as George Eliot says, “what we ought to have been”?  So I am asking myself this question now. 

When you have been ill, as I have been (though now thankfully well on the way to full recovery), it makes you re-assess the whole of your life.  For example, the two cancelled trips to China forced me to look again at how I was going to implement my teaching programme there, and how often I would be travelling over there in the future.  And the success of Mei and Guy’s visit without me to shepherd them around has made me realise yet again the truth of the saying that none of us is indispensable.

One thing I must do is learn to leave behind those many regrets we all have for the things not done or done imperfectly (our Metal regrets).  I cannot now undo what I have done imperfectly, but I can undo how I view what I have done.  And I think this is the secret of “being who we ought to have been”. One of the greatest lessons our life must teach us is that we must learn to accept that at any point in that life we could only do what we could cope with doing.  It’s all too easy for other people, looking at us from the outside, to think we could or should have done things differently.  We could not, because at that time that is all we could do.  To accept our imperfections in this way is a necessary lesson to learn, and, once learnt, will surely help us a little further on the way to being “what we ought to have been”.

The pluses and minuses of life

It’s funny how often I come across some quotation which seems particularly relevant.  A few days ago, I read the following in, of all things, a detective story: “Things always have to even themselves out between plus and minus.  Between going forward and going back.  That’s the only way to live.”

I like the to think that life has to balance itself between pluses and minuses (acupuncturists would say, between yin and yang).  We tend to hope, unrealistically, that somehow the life we live should always be lived on the plus side.  Far better to accept that every plus needs its minus, for this brings the necessary tension which moves us towards change.  Time always hustles us along despite ourselves, jolting us out of complacency, as a minus does its companion plus and plus its minus, and as yin does its yang and yang its yin.

Interesting to find such a potentially deep thought tucked away between the covers of a simple detective story.