In a less romantic and dramatic setting, we fumble in asking our boss for feedback. Our emotions mess up our communication. And our boss knows immediately that we are rather “childish” in asking him to praise our work. Alternatively, we just imagine our request for feedback. Whether our imaged request is successful or not, we feel “embarrassed” about not “having the nerve” to make the request of our boss. We might even grow a bit angry that our boss has placed us in this difficult, tension-filled situation. The resulting cascade of craving might draw in other tensions related to our ambivalent feelings about authority, or to our fear about confrontation with other people. Our craving expands and gains more emotional force.
Van Eenwyk (1997, p. 63) offers a further analysis of the Hopf bifurcation that seems applicable to the dynamics of craving:
“’What goes round, comes round,’ as the saying goes. Consequently, the conflict between order and disorder that rages at a Hopf bifurcation does not disappear from the system when it becomes chaotic. Rather, it remains as a latent potential in the dynamic. When it reappears, it manifests itself as the opposite of the chaos, that is, order. Like flowers in the spring, order reemerges without an advance notice of its presence.”
In applying the Hopf Bifurcation to the matter of Craving, we might predict that a specific craving does not go away. Rather, it remains latent only to once again arise attended by full passion at any moment in time. As portrayed in The Rose, a song written by Amanda McBroom and sung by Better Midler, the graving and passion may remain frozen in the ground of Winter, only to be reemerge (like van Eenwyk’s flowers) in the Spring, “without an advanced notice of its presence.”
The nothingness of Craving would seem to exist not only in the absence of what one fervently desires but also in the absence of directly experienced cravings when they remain frozen in our psyche. As the Craving reemerges, it is accompanied not only by passion, but also by the original tension between hope and hopelessness that established the original bifurcation. “What goes round, comes round” concerns not only our bad behavior, but also our cravings.
Envy
This is among the darkest of all emotions associated with the confrontation of nothingness in self or at least low self-valuing. Whether it be the conspiratorial envy of Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello or the aspirational envy of Eve Harrington in All About Eve, there is the deeply resentful feeling that “I have nothing, you have something”.
It also should be noted that envy comes with a sense of appreciation for the person whom we envy. The challenge is to turn this envious appreciation into a moment of illumination regarding how we might improve. Appreciation transforms envy regarding the other person’s accomplishments into learning from this accomplishment. The other person’s achievement and expertise is transformed into a sense of overall purpose and the collective valuing of this expertise. The remarkable essayist Roger Rosenblatt (1997) revealed just such a process in candidly describing his sense of competition and envy regarding other writers. He suggests that the sense of admiration for the work of other writers can play a critical role in his own life:
“Part of the satisfaction in becoming an admirer of the competition is that it allows you to wonder how someone else did something well, so that you might imitate it—steal it, to be blunt. But the best part is that it shows you that there are things you will never learn to do, skills and tricks that are out of your range, an entire imagination that is out of your range. The news may be disappointing on a personal level, but in terms of the cosmos, it is strangely gratifying. One sits among the works of one’s contemporaries as in a planetarium, head all the way back, eyes gazing up at heavenly matter that is all the more beautiful for being unreachable. Am I growing up?”
