A restorative force

A few weekends ago, my friend and coworker at the Handel Group, Jo Sawalha, introduced an interesting idea about how we subconsciously maintain the status quo in our lives.

I have noticed in my own life that often after a period of intense joy or accomplishment, anything worthy of Whitney Houston's "One moment in time" (pre-Bobby Brown) as a soundtrack, I usually have what can best be described as a slump day. A day when I get cranky, down-in-the-dumps, and overall blah.

For example, after leading my last two-day coaching workshop in New York, I spent the following Monday on the couch watching whatever Netflix Instant Viewing cared to throw at me. It would be one thing if this was my delicious reward for a weekend well spent: a day of blissful movie-going. But it wasn't. It was me feeling too blah to bother getting off the couch and doing something that would really make me happy. It was like I was treating the day as a sick day.

I thought that this pattern was just me being quirky. But then Jo mentioned that she experiences the same thing, and her comment was met with almost universal nods of agreement from my fellow coaches. Some of the coaches described how they would get sick, or moody, or pick fights with their spouses. Woah, I thought. It's not just me. How peculiar.

You could come up with many hypotheses for this trend. Maybe we over-exert ourselves, leaving us more prone to illness. Maybe we tap into some sort of energy reserve, and then need to recharge.

Jo had her own hypothesis. She cited work by David Hawkings (whose ideas she mostly disagrees with, by the way, because they state that people really can't grow and evolve to any great extent), that claims that each person lives at a certain "level" in their day-to-day life. That level can be thought of as an energy level, or a greatness level, or a happiness level. We go about our lives pretty much hanging out at a certain level and that level feels "normal" to us.

Then we do something great, and our level rises, maybe even by a lot. But this new level feels strange and unfamiliar to us, and so unconsciously we create an "equal and opposite force," to quote physics textbooks from time immemorial, to bring us back to our old level. A restorative force. Like laying on the couch watching Netflix. Ah, back to familiar ground.

This concept got me thinking, because it puts us in the driver's seat. What if that restorative force really is deliberate, and not some physical law of human-ness? What if my days of blah have really been me just wanting to return to familiar ground? This would mean that, after an amazing accomplishment or experience, I could stay at that new level if I so choose. Wild. What would it take to stay up there, to make that my new level? What would that shift be like?

It's funny how even as I write this, my first response is "that sounds exhausting." The voice of restoration is persistent, that's for sure. But what if I could bust past the belief that it has to be exhausting, and see what's on the other side? What if?