Iv’e always heard people talk about moving “up”or “forward”, the term progress always had a positive connotation and if you went backward it was negative. Forward movement terms were categorized as “good” and any term that signified backwards motions were categorized as “bad”.
Words and terms like-
- advance, progress
- move forward
- upward mobility
- climb the ladder
- shatter the ceiling
- trail blaze
All these forward terms have a positive connotation and are considered “good”. The fact that we associate direction or movement in conjunction with “good” or “bad” signifies there is a hierarchy as well as a road map to life and happiness. If there is a hierarchy in place, does everyone subscribe to the same description of levels or places within this hierarchy? In my opinion hierarchies are only effective when everyone is playing the game by the same set of rules, following the same map and speaking in the same vernacular. As we know, this is not how the world works today. Maybe back in Pre internet days when the world was a huge scary place and we had limited information about the rest of the world this worked, but it also prohibited free thought and prohibited perspective from other far away communities. The group think or tribal mentality of everyone following the same life path can be effective but fosters ignorance, alnd tends to use terms like “this is the way we have always done it”…which is a term I personally hate.
Many people believe that “bad” is the opposite of “good”. Those same people also believe that the opposite direction of up, is down and the opposite direction of forward is backward, all logical… But what if we did not associate the man-made term “good” with the movement of “forward”? What if we did not associate the movement of “backwards” with “bad”? What if they were just directions? What if they were simply necessary directions that each person uses during their life journey (assuming that there is a journey). If we take away the good and bad connotations from these terms, they are just terms of motion. The opposite of motion is being without motion, stagnancy. So by disassociating the terms good or bad from these terms of motion you also eradicate the construct of a hierarchy in which people navigate, the mental picture would look slightly different (assuming you prescribe to the “road map” ideology of life). The opposite of movement is actually NO movement at all. Being stationary or stagnant is the opposite of moving anywhere.
Removing negative or positive meaning from these movements would change the dialogue when people speak about their life journey. Imagine a journey where moving backwards may be necessary in order to move forward. Moving laterally may be necessary in order to move around an immovable object. Moving forward may not be the best move depending on where you ultimately desire to be. Everyones map is different. Some may be similar, but lets not confuse similarity with being exactly the same.