The Flip Flop Extreme

A few weeks ago, the foundations of my habitual way of thinking and being were shaken. Thankfully so. I was a fan of the phrase "everything in moderation" in regards to many of the things of life. And I would picture the typical scale of balance as the mental image of this idea. I still think this applies well for the things that we put onto and into our bodies, but it doesn't necessarily apply to the way we experience life. Not for myself anyway.
This, in essence, is the flip flop extreme:
Moving back and forth from extremes of an experience/perspective on life, rather than finding the middle ground. Living in the blacks and whites of experience instead of in the dull gray inbetween. Everytime you switch from one to the other, you bring ever more perspective and understanding.
After a lot of thinking about it, I'm realizing that until Jon explained this little philosophy of his, I was living a contradiction in my head. My experience of life has always been somewhat like a sinusoidal graph (only a nerd would use this analogy....); cycles of up and down, through good and bad, black and white. But there I was picturing this balanced scale as my motto of being. Really, the image I should be seeing is the scale in complete inbalance, but constantly shifting back and forth so that over a period of time, it is in fact balanced.