Balance

(Sabrina Friesen wrote and sent this to me a few weeks ago in mid-December…back when it was warmer and much slushier…it is being published now with Carolyn finally finished her family gatherings!  🙂 

Balance. 

It’s not a new word. We’ve all heard it. We apparently should all be striving for this in our lives in some way, shape, or form. We hear about it in regards to exercise, eating, activities, spirituality…it seems that just about every area of our life can be tweaked and twisted to accommodate things a little better, to make things a little more even, or a little bit more…well, balanced. Every now and then it slips out of my mouth in a session, then I make a cringey-face, apologize, and try and explain again what I meant without using that “B-word”.

Perhaps it’s a word you love; maybe you have it plastered on a poster in your kitchen or tattooed it on your left forearm.  Maybe it reminds you to take a breath and slow.  

If it works? Go for it. 

Please enjoy it and continue to find it meaningful.  I personally just have a little beef with balance so I do my best to steer clear. 

To me, finding balance feels a little like trying to find a rainbow-eating unicorn.

The past few days in Winnipeg have been exceptionally disgusting to drive in. We are (thankfully) having a bout of warmer weather, but it is not a vehicle- or a cute boot- or a nice new parka-friendly kind of spell.  It’s a disaster out there.  After figuring out how to open up the hood of my once-grey-but-now-perma-brown van, I messily spilled a whole jug of washer fluid in and I’m sure it’s going to require filling in the next few days again. While it’s nice to not be chilled to the bone in mid-December, it seems impossible to escape the mess.

And then I was thinking about how sometimes life is like that too. There are good things and hard things and seasons where mess is everywhere, and no matter what we do or how hard we try it seems that we can’t get out from under it. 

We do our best to clean it up and before we know it our tank is dry and windows are splattered yet again. 

And this is where the idea of balance kind of falls apart for me.

When I think of balance what comes to mind is a scale—like the scales of justice.

Google defines it as an even distribution of weight enabling someone or something to remain upright and steady. 

But what happens when the mess is piled on thick and the weight of life is distributed anything but evenly? Or when life is in a peachy place and everything is coming up roses for you?  Do we want a little balance then to remind us that life can be crappy, or can we ride the upswing and just enjoy it?

I often use the image of a pendulum on a grandfather clock in session. Sometimes folks are inclined to try and live at either end of the spectrum, making life a little black and white as they try to stick to the extremes.

• We want it to be perfect, or we give up.
• We want to feel close to our partner in just the right way, or we shut them out.
• We wantit our way or no way.

So to combat this tendency to polarize life I talk with people about of learning to sit in the middle, in the expanse of grey that fills the space between the seemingly safe and certain black and white that we often gravitate towards.

I am becoming more and more convinced that part of our task of life is to learn to sit in the ambiguity of grey spaces, which if you think of how much time a clock pendulum spends swinging from one side to the next, it’s quite a lot. Those black and white moments only happen for a split second before the pendulum swoops low and carries on.

So when someone talks about ‘balance’ what I hear is that we should strive to have that pendulum sit in the middle, at the perfect shade of grey between the black and white extremes.  I imagine someone sitting in front of a clock pendulum willing it to stop at center and being frustrated when it swings by time and time and time again.  

I think sometimes trying to find balance in life is like that, we set up this goal of a peace-filled, tranquil existence and get disappointed when life keeps swinging in ways we cannot control. I wonder if the pursuit of balance can actually be a shame-inducing exercise, as we feel discouraged and like we’ve failed when we can’t quite get the pendulum to stop for us in just the right spot.

But if not ‘balance’, then what?

What comes to mind for me is the idea of hanging out on the ocean. What does it mean to see the ebb and flow of life as normative, rather than something that needs to be escaped?  What if we could learn to roll with the crappy things that happen—where we paddled hard to stay afloat when the waters are rough, and then enjoyed the surf when things were going well?

For me the past six months have held some unusually demanding stuff…heavy stuff…overwhelming stuff.  Life hasn’t been super smooth in many respects.  The reality is that although I would like to rest more, see friends more, get more done, spend time alone, or do different things with my time—I can’t.  Life circumstances have made it impossible to take care of myself in a way that some folks would consider a ‘balanced’ fashion.  

And yet I don’t think that means I’ve failed myself or those I love during these months.  Rather than trying to shift the pendulum to a different spot, I’ve worked hard to be present in the mess, where I keep spraying the windshield of my life so I can move a few hundred feet ahead before more mud get splattered.  It’s meant buying more pre-cooked chickens for supper, cleaning my house less, and disconnecting from friends a bit more than I’d like.  

But it’s a season.  

I am confident that this wave will hit the shore and calm waters will come.  And when they do I’ll rest and relax and enjoy them then.  Striving for something other than the life I have been living would only have served to add to the stress, making me feel like I ‘should’ be floating gently on the ocean rather than paddling frantically to keep my head above water.  It’s hard to float peacefully on stormy seas.

In theory, I think that balance is a lovely idea.

Kind of like the idea of finding a perfect spouse.  

But when rubber hits the road we meet life at full speed, finding out quickly it is full of twists and turns and surprises. Perhaps, rather than willing life to stop in a steady middle position, what would it mean to get comfortable with legs wrapped around the post on the pendulum, to hold on tight, and work at being present in each swoop up and slope down rather than wishing ourselves into some other space?