The Tao of Yin Becoming Yang...

Yesterday was a really, really bad day, and not just because of Mr. Squirrel.  That was, unfortunately, only the beginning.  In fact, yesterday was a continuing escalation of a bad day that had really started the day before.

My computer crashed yesterday morning.  Again.  And crashed, and crashed, and crashed all day, and nothing I did helped at all.  In fact, every single one of my personal computing devices has died in the last week.  My smartphone died on Friday, and I'm still trying to find the time to get back to the store before they close in the evening to pick up a new one.  On Sunday, my internet at home crapped out, and didn't come back up again until Tuesday evening, after I reset and reconfigured every single part of it.  And for the last couple of days, my work machine has been dying a slow, painful death, as well.  I feel like I've spent my entire week just trying to get my computers, which I rely on so much for the functioning of my everyday life, to simply fucking work.

I ended up spending almost my entire day yesterday trying to fix my work computer.  Of course, I couldn't get any of my work done while I was doing this.  But that doesn't magickally push any of my deadlines back, either.  So every hour I spent trying to fix my machine was an hour that I no longer had to get any of my work done, and I was very aware of this in the moment.  And every time I tried to fix the problem, and failed, my frustration, aggravation, and stress levels rose.

I tried to find the Joy in my situation, but I just couldn't overcome the negative things I was feeling.  Even the fact that in trying to fix my problem I was learning all sorts of new things (normally an almost sensual pleasure for me) about the coding and configuration behind-the-scenes of my web browser wasn't enough to make me feel better in the face of ACH! FUCK! WHY WON'T MY COMPUTER WORK?!

I felt like a failure.  I'd barely made it a week, and here I was, losing my sense of Joy already.  I knew it wouldn't last forever, but I honestly thought I could make it last longer than that.  And then I realized that feeling like a failure for not living up to the spirit of UT #3, was also contradictory to the spirit of ManniMoonYin's Universal Tautology #2, "You cannot be good.  You cannot be bad.  You can only be."  Which, ironically, only made me feel like more of a failure.

But this morning was the beginning of a new day.  And I awoke with a fresh perspective.

What I realize as I observe all of this, is the Tao of Yin Becoming Yang.

You can't be happy constantly, all the time.  It's not that it is impossible to accomplish, but rather that if you're happy all the time, then eventually it ceases to be "happy" and becomes simply "normal."  Yin and Yang combining to form the Tao symbolizes that we live in a world of duality.  Or, rather, that our perception of the world is a dual one.  We can only distinguish something in terms of its opposite.  We only know what "happiness" is, because of "unhappiness," and vice versa.  Without "happiness" there is no "unhappiness," and vice versa.  So, in order to maintain happiness, it must occasionally be tempered with some unhappiness.  I realize now that the goal of UT #3 is not to be happy all the time, forever.  It is simply to be as happy as possible, as much of the time as possible, and to learn to let the unhappiness come and go when it must, without attachment, and to recognize it as essential to continued happiness.

In that sense, yesterday was actually a success for me.  Not because I got upset.  But because when I was upset, and when it became clear to me that I was not going to be able to Brightside my way out of these feelings, I responded by trying to let them go and not hang on to them, and by trying to remain calm and simply deal with the problem at hand without letting myself get all worked up about it.  I reminded myself that, "Yes, this sucks, but it's not the end of the world.  And sometimes things suck, and that is just a fact of living.  So, there's nothing to do but try to let it go, and focus on the problem at hand."  And I remembered UT #1, the "Primary Directive" (I totally just thought that up - no, really):  "All things that Are, are Change."  In other words, "This too, shall pass."

And it did.