When I think of balance the first image that pops in my head is a seesaw at the playground when I was a child. Its fluid motion lands you at the top or bottom quite abruptly, or ever so carefully in perfect parallel with the earth and the sky. These actions are not independently exclusive, but rather together in harmony with the movement.
Up, down and balanced harmoniously together. Brilliant! The challenge is putting this into action. How do we realize balance in all things we do? I have learned to rationalize many things in my life and balance brings needed equilibrium into focus.
Mark Twain said, “What is joy without sorrow? What is success without failure? What is a win without a loss? What is health without illness? You have to experience each if you are to appreciate the other. There is always going to be suffering. It’s how you look at your suffering, how you deal with it, that will define you.” (Thank you, Deb H. for the Twain inspo.)
When you trip and fall down you don’t crawl on the ground indefinitely because that is where you landed. You leap to your feet, look around to make sure no one saw you fall, then you move about as if nothing happened. Balance delivers light in the dark. It gets you back on your feet! It is capable of offsetting spite, revenge, anger, and blame by empowering forgiveness, acceptance, appreciation, accountability, and gratitude.
If we balance negative with positive, the seesaw lands in the middle. Painful lessons may appear as more evident and obvious because they are not the hopeful outcome. Conversely, joyous lessons can slip under the radar because they are our expectation.
If joy eventually results from pain, then it washes over us like a revelation. If joy results from joy, it is often our expectation and lacks some of the revelationary qualities that joy from pain exhibits. They are both equally pertinent because if we distinguish the value and power in either lesson then growth prevails, and we find balance.
I have learned that painful lessons illuminate a path to a big ass gold framed mirror… Back so soon? Time for some self-reflection. Sometimes the mirror is foggy when I arrive, but as it clears, I can see the tools shining in the background poised for battle.
For us to thrive, balance needs to be in everything we do and everywhere we look. We can’t lose sight of the choice, the choice to balance joy with pain, good with bad, freedom with struggle, strength with weakness, gain with loss, right with wrong, compassion with abstinence, acceptance with rejection, empathy with apathy.
Balance is the calm in the storm.
It is not about choosing one direction over the other per se, it is about seeing the counter balance inherent in both directions. In the moment, it is hard to not see pain as pain but if the glass is half full then there is nothing negative that does not find its way to positive.
Ultimately, it is the harmonious fluid movement of the seesaw, up, down and balanced, that heals and empowers my choices and the direction they lead me.
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I think you may have just described some of what makes up the Ying and Yang relationship.
Thank you, definitely! Other cultures seem to have a better grasp of this than ours!