Life is a perpetual journey towards a state of balance. Most of us never get there (and if we do, it is only momentary) but our actions and reactions are nevertheless motivated by this primal and often unconscious desire to achieve harmony.

The things we do in order to achieve this elusive state often elicit strange and unexpected reactions from the world around us, tipping us further into chaos. One of the reasons for this is that our existential quest for balance is actually driven by a single-minded pursuit of pleasure… a pursuit that almost invariably reaches its bounds and triggers some form of pain instead.

Just think of the sun. We bend towards it. We revel in its glow. We do this because it gives us pleasure… but we do it until it burns our skin and only when some of us die from it do we actually acknowledge that it is wrong. But painful and stupid as it may seem, this primal drive for pleasure provides us with a thruster button in our quest for balance.