The War

A war is being waged right now. Without a theater, without arms; but with two sides each of which have an enduring cause and lasting effect on the war's sole participant. I haven't yet discovered the exact extent or locality of it. I know that I'm a part of it, or rather that it's a part of me, and I know that I am not alone in that fact. But whether or not this is something embodied in every human being who has ever lived is unknown to me. Maybe the war is a front of the modern age. Maybe it's a plague, afflicting only the prone or the unlucky and trading blows among the alcoholics, the overly thought-provoked, the otherwise weak and historically known as the melancholy. Maybe it's a plague in the sense of aging, and affecting everyone to varying accounts; maybe it's a plague in the sense of cancer, and there are those who exist who will experience a life completely devoid of it altogether.

Many religions and philosophies of the world prescribe balance as a key proponent of existence. The Yin and The Yang. Heaven and Hell. The Feather of Ma'at, an ostrich feather, being weighed on a scale against one's heart for each soul passing between Ancient Egypt and the Duat. These principles go remarkably far back in the stories that man told himself, and it was written down as soon as he evolved the ability to do so. Human's are laughably predictable, and the patterns that go back to the core of humanity are inanely simple. We really appreciate when things are in threes, and organize our religious personifications into a "trinity" even when they represent the same thing. We see faces in all sorts of ordinary objects, and can often be caught worshiping these objects as if the face actually embodies something other than our keen ability to spot them. And we absolutely love when there are two opposing forces colliding in equity, creating in our minds a true perfection in the immediate center.

Any personal trainer will tell you that you need rest, as well as exercise, to build strength and muscle. For an air conditioner to create cold air, it needs a compressor to warm the air up. And perhaps the best manifestation of harmony composed in two parts is the human brain. We have a left hemisphere for logic and analysis, and a right hemisphere for creativity and holistic intuition. Without the left we'd be unbound to reality, but without the right we'd be unable to describe it. The substantial amount of evidence a human can gather at a basic level to support the notion that balance equals grace, provides a reason for it's ubiquity over thousands of years and billions of people.

However if you explain the concept of balance with darker insinuation, you could very well be lead to the concept of war. "A set of opposing forces" versus "a set of opposing forces, with significant disagreement". It's this thought that leads me down the rabbit whole of questioning the aspects of life, particularly happiness. If balance is to be trusted as natural law, it would mean an equilibrium between white and black. It would mean an equal amount of days that are bright, and days that are dark. There is wholesome optimism where it appears that time and you and everyone exists so that that brightness can be appreciated. There is also a shadow, a dreadful perception that the passing of time is just a tally to remind you of your existence, and it's lack of everything except it. Both of these states are objectively real, and they're struggling among themselves and similar states to thrive. They represent a set of opposing forces, with significant disagreement: a war.

If sin and virtue or Yin and Yang are to appropriately be applied to life, they could hate and claw at each other in war just as easily, if not more easily, than they could coexist in harmony. Like the angel on one shoulder and the Devil on the other, they could be pulling you with all of their might in one direction, they could deceive you and cheat their way into your attention. And the same can be said of happiness and despondency.

Optimism and pessimism. Peace and anxiety. Hope and despair. They absolutely hate each other, always trying to rid you of their opposition and find ways to convince you that they are right and the other is wrong. They play tricks, and disguise themselves as other sentiments, and cloud your head with conflicting thoughts, only to reveal a Trojan horse at it's core with more of the same. And they save the most deceitful delusion until one of the two has a firm grip on your mind, when it will relentlessly tell you that it has won the war for good, and the other will never return.

But that deceit, as it turns out, is what exposes the two and their perpetual battle to an exploitable flaw in the system upon which they wreak havoc. Once it's revealed that each side isn't rooted within the limits of truth, you can choose who to believe. Choice becomes an invaluable asset in war, particularly among allies and the like-minded, as a soldiery bound by common cause is dominant to one bound by conscription. You, despite being trapped in your own mind where this war is held, are dignified enough to pick a side if you're intelligent enough to realize that this is all the case. You could choose to fight alongside happiness, to pick the losing team that seems to be constantly devastated; or you could choose to do nothing, to flow through the path of least resistance which always seems to lead to despondency.

Regardless, the war is never won, only the battle of the day. Maybe you find yourself in a good and bright day, or maybe despite your best efforts you find yourself in a dark and miserable day. It may seem that happiness has acquired a secret weapon of sorts, and the war is close to an end, but it's equally possible that despondency has answered with it's own, and the arms race continues. When you wake up and find that one or the other has made a strike, all you can do is go about time and existence in concession until the next day when the other will strike back. Either way, the key is to keep fighting, so that slowly and methodically and in a way that's unnoticeable in the short term, your side wins more often than it loses.

A plague is caused by coccobacillus bacteria. Bacteria, a morbid creature that seems to have no place in the world but has placed itself in such a way that you can never fully rid of it. Instead, our immune systems have evolved to sniff the bad ones out and remove them one by one. Our bodies fully acknowledge the fact that we will never live a day without bacteria trying to force it's way in and apply it's crude ideology; and so, our bodies continue, day after day, to fight them off. It's not a fight to a definite end, it's a fight that results in just enough of the plague being pushed back each morning so that we can experience a normal day without even noticing the struggle happening deep down.

This is the war of happiness. It's a daily contagion creeping forward like the tide, which left unchecked will swallow you whole like the flood of a town with no levies. It's a curse that cares nothing of it's own purpose other than to breach your mind and infect. Unfortunately, like bacteria we will never live a moment without it somewhere present inside of us breeding and pushing and taking over if you let it. Therefore, it's entirely a blessing, a miracle even, that we have optimism, the Yang, the ostrich feather, serving like our immune system in an attempt to reinstate the balance we're told we're born with. And as we're conscious beings and graced with intelligence, we can do countless acts in our part to help tip the scales. That is the war of happiness.

And the war rages on.