A Little Out of Balance
I really enjoyed the Marvel Universe. Every once in a while—and not a long while—I will start with Iron Man and run through all of the movies, ending up with Endgame. And, of course, there are things in each of them that make me think.
For example, what if I told you that the problem with Thanos was that he was probably correct about the diagnosis, but really screwed the pooch when it came to the solution?
I don’t really know if the pooch statement is appropriate, but you have to give him credit for identifying an ongoing problem. He was looking at the suffering of living beings and decided to act on that suffering. His diagnosis was that the universe had fallen out of balance: too many living beings competing for too few resources.
His solution was monstrous.
But in the end, after all the weapons, soldiers, power, and finger-snapping, he retired to grow those weird fruits he was cooking.
I have also been thinking about what he meant when he said, “I am inevitable.”
What was inevitable?
His winning? His ego? His commitment? His solution?
Like I said, I have been thinking about it. And in typical Dr. Curt fashion, the thought rattled around in my brain until I jumped into a completely different universe.
So let’s think about human development.
Yeah, I know…
That is probably an odd place to go from Thanos. But stay with me for a minute.
Thanos believed something was out of balance and therefore balance needed to be restored.
That premise is strangely familiar.
We like balance.
It is one of the closures we seek. Everything in balance, right?
Like fairness?
We talk about balanced lives, balanced diets, emotional balance, work-life balance. Even our bodies are constantly working to keep us within ranges that allow us to function. Temperature, blood sugar, hydration, sleep, arousal—all of these involve regulatory processes that continually move us back toward something workable.
We call much of this homeostasis.
That is the boring biological term.
But psychologically, we seem to like something similar: predictable, understandable, no surprises. We get what we expect.
And we want answers.
I remember the last time I wanted closure.
Well, sometimes surprises are good. Birthday parties. Finding a twenty-dollar bill in an old coat.
But there are some surprises I don’t like.
Those I don’t even like to think about.
And maybe that is one of the places where we don’t always get closure.
I think some of my assumptions about closure came from the way I was trained to think about change in my previous profession.
For a long time, I think I quietly assumed that development worked in roughly the same direction. We begin with something missing or unstable, acquire what we need, become healthier, and gradually move toward greater balance.
There is an end that will justify all the discomfort that preceded it.
If I press this pressure point just the right way, I get movement in the right direction.
But I am beginning to think humans—and life—don’t work exactly that way.
I am wondering whether we have put at least two very different processes on the same track and then acted surprised when something different happens.
Most people have heard of Abraham Maslow. He made a distinction that may be more important to me than the familiar pyramid suggests.
People who have worked with me know that I have tended to see more in Maslow’s theories than a lot of people do. When I read some of his actual work, I noticed nuance that didn’t fit as cleanly into the ladder I had seen in textbooks.
Part of what he distinguished were needs arising from deficiency and motivations associated with growth or Being.
I have usually thought of these as different levels of development.
But perhaps they are different processes.
Two processes instead of one.
Maslow called one side deficiency needs.
A deficit creates tension. I am hungry, so I eat. I am exhausted, so I
sleep. I am frightened, so I seek safety. Successful action reduces the deficit and brings the organism back toward a workable range.
That makes sense.
It can drive us, and then we get some closure.
But the other process—the one associated with Being—looks different to me.
I am increasingly thinking of that as developmental.
And development does something peculiar.
It often moves us away from what is already workable.
More importantly, it often moves us toward something that feels uncomfortable.
When I learn something genuinely new, it unsettles what I already understand. If you want an example, read my essay on Job.
Intimacy makes me feel vulnerable in ways isolation does not.
But I crave intimacy.
Responsibility introduces obligations I did not previously carry.
But part of my identity has been my work.
Encountering another person’s perspective can disrupt the comfortable certainty of my own.
I like being sure.
I would prefer to be the smartest person in the room.
Oops…
Grief can permanently change the world in which I live.
I shouldn’t have losses, right?
All of those can feel a little on the unsafe side.
And I should always feel safe.
Please?
No. These feelings introduce uncertainty into my life, as opposed to the comfort of certainty.
They bring up questions.
They challenge assumptions I may have been quite comfortable carrying around.
Development repeatedly asks an organism that has achieved some degree of stability to tolerate becoming unstable again.
Remember wanting to ride a bicycle or learn to drive?
I do.
I remember that really well.
Three driving tests before I didn’t screw up the parking.
I have a whole bunch of words from the Urban Dictionary that describe how it feels to become unstable again.
Can’t it just be settled?
Consistent?
Predictable?
Please?
Perhaps that is partly what the stability is for.
When I talk about these processes, I am beginning to call the first homeostatic. It moves toward regulation: enough safety, enough predictability, enough needs being met for the organism to function.
The other I am calling developmental.
These are the processes through which we become something more—or at least something different—from what we were while things were stable.
That may be precisely why they cannot be the same process.
Maybe homeostasis does not produce development simply by continuing upward along the same ladder.
Maybe it creates enough of a foundation that development becomes possible.
We become stable enough to become, for a while, a little out of balance.
Erik Erikson may have understood something like this when he described human development through a series of tensions: trust and mistrust, autonomy and shame or doubt, initiative and guilt, intimacy and isolation, generativity and stagnation, integrity and despair.
Those pairings are interesting because development does not seem to require eliminating one side.
Can you imagine if it did?
And I wonder whether those tensions ever really disappear. Maybe later development does not replace the earlier tensions at all.
Maybe it adds new tensions to the ones we have already learned to carry.
And maybe I am noticing that now because I am actually living inside one of those tensions rather than simply reading about it.
Part of my journey in retirement is discovering who I am now that my profession is no longer such a large part of my identity.
It is hard.
I am finding things that I never knew before.
And I will be a million years old soon…
That makes me look differently at Erikson’s pairings.
Complete trust would be dangerous.
Some doubt restrains autonomy.
Intimacy does not require the disappearance of separateness.
Integrity near the end of life does not somehow erase everything that might give a person reason for despair—or grief, anger, or shame.
Development seems to take place somewhere within the tension of the moment and time.
That raises a possibility I have not fully worked out:
Maybe tension is not an unfortunate side effect of development.
Maybe tension is inevitable wherever development is occurring. It may even be necessary for the development of becoming smarter, faster, better—or simply different from what we were before.
This brings back that word from the beginning.
Inevitable.
And maybe that identifies part of Thanos’s error in judgment.
I am not saying suffering is good.
I am not even saying suffering is inevitable.
Tension and suffering are not necessarily the same thing.
I am also not saying instability should be sought.
And I certainly do not mean that every form of distress should simply be endured. There are forms of physiological and psychological dysregulation that seriously interfere with our ability to live, choose, relate, and function.
Restoring stability can be essential.
Necessary.
But stability may be a foundation rather than an endpoint.
I am thinking about—and playing with—the possibility that once enough stability exists, development begins disturbing it.
And then something else magical happens.
By the way, that word magical reminds me of Arthur C. Clarke’s famous line: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Or something close to that.
The distinction is important to me.
Something can feel magical without being magic.
The experience is real enough. But what caused the experience, what it means, and what it is grounded in are different questions.
Feeling something tells me that something is happening.
It does not necessarily tell me what is happening.
Think about the science experiments in junior high. That bubbling goop coming out of the test tubes?
That still freaks me out.
Anyway…
Human beings naturally want the disturbance to stop.
We prefer what is familiar.
We reuse explanations that have worked before.
Skills become habits.
Habits become routines.
Successful routines become expectations.
Eventually we can forget that the thing we now experience as normal was itself once an adaptation.
And it doesn’t remain just a clean habit.
First we forget why we practiced it.
Then we can do other things at the same time.
Like driving.
I have been calling some of that drift.
Drift is not necessarily bad.
It conserves energy. It allows us to function without reconsidering every decision from the beginning. A life in which everything remained permanently open to reconsideration would probably be unlivable.
But development pulls in another direction.
Development introduces something that does not quite fit.
A new fact.
A new relationship.
A loss.
A contradiction.
A different person with purposes of their own.
An experience that our previous explanation cannot quite contain.
The old equilibrium is disturbed again.
Perhaps human life therefore contains a recurring movement:
stability makes development possible;
development creates tension;
we adapt;
the adaptation becomes familiar;
and eventually something exceeds it again.
If so, there may never be a final state in which a developing human being becomes perfectly balanced.
That thought becomes more important when we move beyond individuals.
Other people do not exist simply to stabilize my world.
They have purposes of their own.
Their purposes will sometimes conflict with mine.
The more seriously I recognize their agency, the less reasonable it becomes to expect the tension between us simply to disappear.
Later, that raises questions about leverage, restraint, politics, and even our recurring dreams of creating societies in which the important conflicts have finally been solved.
But I am not ready to go there yet.
For the moment, I am interested in the smaller thought.
Maybe Thanos was right about inevitability and simply had the wrong object.
Not Thanos.
Not disorder.
Perhaps tension.
Not because something has necessarily gone wrong.
But because something—or someone—is still becoming.