I've been thinking about balance quite a lot lately. Whenever I start to experience a change in the seasons, I suddenly feel compelled to take stock of my mental and emotional state.
Balance is something that we seem to be ever questing for but never seem to attain. We strive for the balanced diet, a balanced budget, balancing work and home life and the list continues. It strikes me how much frustration we experience when we percieve that there isn't balance and how we struggle to push the tides one way or another. I have been thinking about whether or not it's actually this quest for balance that causes us so much anguish. I've been looking to nature for examples of how it balances. The shocking thing I have been noticing is that there never seems to be any balance anywhere. The prevailing system that seems to work is an ebb and flow. It seems that all of nature is gently swinging from it's one tolerable extreme to another and gently back again. I am starting to think that this may just be the model to ease frustrations.
The seasons move from the heat of summer through the cold of winter. During that time all of nature prepares for each of the extremes instead of railing against the changes. The tides are the oceans dance of gravitational pull with the moon. Predator and prey cycles ebb and flow with times of diversity to times of scarcity. Even birthing has a wave cycle to it of hormones etc. The only constant in any of the systems is change. Change isn't always what we consider progress either. The change is along a gradient in both directions; it's cyclical, it's wave-like.
For some reason we seem to embrace change in only one direction, never both directions. We are always questing to have more money, more food, more spare time, more leisure time. Emotionally, we are questing for happiness, peace, serenity, joy while simultaneously fighting all negative thoughts, sadness, turmoil and pains in our life. We are looking for the constant balance in our marriage, everyone contributing equally to the home and equally to the income. Every child gets the same ammount of attention and all family members get the same amount of time with extra curricular activities. It seems that the model we have grown up with is that life is only worth while or has value if change is non-existent or in one direction only.
I think the new model for me is going to be the ocean instead of a balancing act. Our family unit seems to work best when things continue to change back and forth along a gradient depending on factors beyond our control. I imagine our life now as a waltz with factors that we do and don't understand as our partners. Our budget changes every month but the yearly pattern is surprisingly predictable. Our time that we can devote to, or bear to spend with, eachother and other activities moves along a gradient but doesn't seem frustrating at either extreme when we know that it will soon move back along the line in the other direction.
I'm interested in trying this new social experiment and seeing if I live less frustrated in the times to come.
