Without the ups and downs, it would just be a flatline. The problem is we tend to synchronize our efforts, rather than harmonize them, so it becomes one big up and consequently one big down, rather than many small ups and downs, all balancing out. Humanity has become one giant organism, consuming its ecosystem.
We are these mobile organisms and this necessitates the sequential process of perception, by which we experience our reality, so our sense of time is as the point of the present, moving past to future, but the reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
There is no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
Energy is "conserved," because it is the present. It creates time, as well as temperature, pressure, colors, sounds. Frequencies and amplitudes. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.
So energy, as process, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past. With a wave, the energy drives it, while the fluctuations rise and fall.
In a factory, the product goes start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product. Lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old. Form and process going opposite directions of time.
Consciousness goes past to future, while perceptions, emotions and thoughts rise and fall, future to past. Potential, actual, residual. Though it is the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the central nervous system sorts and orders the forms/information.
Consider that three dimensions are really just a mapping device, like longitude, latitude and altitude. If you remove all physical properties from space, it has the non-physical qualities of infinity and equilibrium. Infinity because there is nothing to bound it and equilibrium is implicit in Special Relativity, as the frame with the fastest clock and longest ruler is closest to the equilibrium of the vacuum. The unmoving void of absolute zero.
So space is the absolute and the infinite.
Now consider what fills space, energy and the forms it manifests. The energy radiates out, toward infinity, while the forms coalesce in, toward equilibrium. Both of which are entropic.
We just fluctuate somewhere in the middle, between everything cancelling out and everything fading out.