Balances

Life, the Universe, and Everything have been conspiring to bring the idea of balance to the forefront of just about everything I do lately. Everything is an exercise in balancing, or a lesson in how to balance disparate wants and needs against each other, or a warning about what happens when you lose your balance.

How do you balance the obligation to take care of yourself with the desire to take care of others? How do you balance the need for stability against the demands of incurable wanderlust? How do you apportion your time so that everyone with a claim to it gets a share? How do you decide who to give claim to your time? How do you keep from leaning on anyone too hard when you're tired?

All questions of balance.

Perspective has a way of shifting rapidly; a month ago, two months ago, I would have told you that my life was much like strolling through a wide, flat field: lots of room to frolic, lots of margin for error. Lately I feel more as if I'm walking the knife-edge of a precipice. There's an exhilaration in the endeavor, a degree of excitement, a playful tendency to tempt fate. But there's not a lot of room for error. One misstep and I'll stumble. Maybe I'll fall, maybe I won't, maybe the fall won't be so bad, maybe falling off the edge is the only way off the precipice.

Or maybe I just need to change my perspective, maybe it's not a ridge pole I'm walking after all, maybe the field is still wide and flat and I just can't see.

I am struggling with balance, though. I keep getting knocked off of mine. You're never really done learning a thing; I thought I had found my balance. The key to balance is to find the solar plexus, the center around which everything else moves. This is as true in some amorphous idea of "life" as it is in the body. Life is a balancing act, give and take, ebb and flow, the self against the other against the world, a series of calculations and judgments and weighings.

So here is life, the universe, and everything teaching me that balance is not something you find once and have done. Like anything else, it's a constant process of learning and refining. The balance I found a year ago doesn't work today, because I am different and the things I carry are different and the people around me are different and my life is different. I am not Snow White; I do not live unchanging under glass, and everything is always in a state of flux.

I think I'm adding things, willy-nilly, careless: I think my wanderlust is overpowering my balance. I strike out for new things and new experiences and new horizons heedless of the distance and my unpreparedness and realize halfway there I might not make it and then I want someone else to carry me.

How silly. If someone carries me, I never actually arrive there.

So, here I am. Reaching for new things that are only half-seen and less-understood, blindly groping for the newness of it, the adventure, the thrill. I will probably always do this. This is wanderlust, in some rarefied form that doesn't actually require me to go somewhere else. I will always be finding my balance anew.

If I lean on you too often too long too heavily, give me a hug and push me off. Smile. I'll remember that I'm striking out for new horizons and that if I let someone else carry me I'll never actually arrive. Then come with me. Because I'll want you there in whatever new land I land in.