Emotionally, directionality is more important than magnitude.

We certainly all experience ups and downs emotionally. We experience large-scale variations throughout the years of our life with huge ups like marriage and graduations, and then downs like romantic breakups and job losses. We experience smaller variations in emotion that impact us on a monthly basis like getting a new TV or new clothing, and then medium-sized downers like a car accident or losing our wallet.

But then within these grand ups and downs and the medium-sized ups and downs or little variations minute by minute like being appreciated at work for a task completed, getting a good parking spot, getting a good checkup at the doctor after some worrisome abdominal pain, or finding immediate seating at our favorite lunch restaurant. This is interspaced with minute-by-minute discouragements like a teenage daughter snapping at us, being late for an appointment, temporarily misplacing our keys, or finding out all the Cheetos are gone.

If you plot this emotional variation on a chart, it would look like a sine curve, gently going up and down throughout our life, with a smaller sine curve within the large one, and then little variations along the smaller curves. There are two things that really strike me as curious. One is that many of the tiny curves feel just as dramatic as the big ones.

For example, sometimes finding a lump on our body that later that day checks out to be “normal” by our doctor, or having a small argument with our loved one, or getting scolded by our boss; these can all feel overwhelmingly discouraging in the moment, and have just the same immediate impact as something real and lasting like the death of a relative. By the same token, the tiny ups we experience can really have a gigantic impact on our mood too, like getting a loving appreciative text message from our child, getting an unexpected $300 bonus, or getting all green lights when we are racing to an appointment.

The second curiosity is how the directionality of our emotional mood seems to be far more important than the actual magnitude on this graph of our emotion. When we are in a real low point in our life, and the sine curve is down in the negative area, and then something encouraging happens it lifts us up quite remarkably. Even though in the grand scheme it will not raise us much, or for long, it feels great for a while.

Likewise, when we are really on a general high in our life, something minor that discourages us can have a huge impact on us, even though we know it will not take us down too far, or last very long, it feels really significant in the moment.

So this is the journey in life… ups and downs overlying ups and downs overlying ups and downs. I like to take time to understand it and feel the comfort in knowing every up is followed by a down and every down is followed by an up, both on the large scale and the small scale. I find it really reassuring to know this, and to understand that the little stuff is actually just as important and the big stuff. With regards to our emotional mood, it seems the most important thing is not where we are on the graph in the positive or negative spectrum, but rather what direction we are going in the moment, up or down.

I like to embrace this natural balance in life, that is the dichotomy of our human existence, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. What a ride!