You have doubtless read about creating balance in your life. Common trade-offs include work vs. play, family vs. friends, and child-rearing vs. everything else.
Quality time is also mentioned as if it were possible to offer small amounts of devoted attention to one’s children in compensation for frequent or lengthy absences.
Something is missing here, or, one should say, there is at least one unmentioned challenge to reaching the equilibrium you are shooting for. It is how much time you spend preoccupied with troublesome ideas and feelings compared to the amount dedicated to lifting your spirit.
Further complicating the matter, the mind often drifts when not focused on something chosen or required.
Like the current of a river, the absence of focus carries some minds to dark places, including loss, anxiety, and physical pain. Those who are less troubled and more buoyant might land in a more agreeable resting place when the water grows still.
Wherever one lands regularly is called his set point, his usual state of being — his typical condition. The notion of a characteristic destination or norm also applies to such qualities as weight and body temperature.
Another feature of emotional balance is the source of the up or down emotion you sense within. Watching lots of partisan TV can impair a sense of peace. The alternative of avoiding commentary on societal distress might seem better, but it provides only temporary relief and a lack of preparedness to take on the part of life you find unsettling.
Each individual makes a choice about this, whether aware of it or not. Less noted are those who hold the dark and the light at the same time:
Alas, our fundamental experience is duality: mind and body, freedom and necessity, evil and good, and certainly world and God. It is the same with our protest against pain and death. In the poetry I select(ed) [for my anthology “A Book of Luminous Things”], I am not seeking an escape from dread but, rather, proof that dread and reverence can exist within us simultaneously. — Czeslaw Milosz
Milosz suggests one can give due consideration to two states of being, each believed to exclude the other. In 2025, this might mean seeking joy in beauty, music, friendship, exploration of the world, and love as a first step.
It can also involve momentarily setting aside some of life’s ills while carefully selecting a tolerable portion to concentrate on and enlarging one’s resilience and capacity to endure.
Faith can enable balance, whether religious, belief in oneself, or confidence in what Martin Luther King called “the arc of the moral universe,” slowly bending toward justice.
A key to greater balance is recognizing that balance is never fixed—it never reaches a stationary permanence. Thus, even master meditators must keep practicing to approach a state of serenity.
Think of the tightrope walker. He forever adjusts his stance and the pole he holds across his body while his feet move him toward his goal.
Bravery and ways to defeat anxiety are also part of what he learns, as is the skill to progress along a thin, straight line in his circular arena. His certainty of where he is going is no small factor in his likelihood of success. He is occupied with one task alone.
Accepting the never-completed balancing act necessary to your journey might calm you. Fighting against this necessity—believing in its unfairness and raging against the world for fashioning this predicament—will do you no good.
One more thing.
If you’d like to hear an upbeat four-minute speech for all of us given by Adam Clayton Powell in the late ’60s, here it is: “Keep the Faith, Baby.”
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The top and bottom photos are another example of the brilliant work of Laura Hedien: Laura Hedien Official Website.
The first is Afternoon Sun in East Lothian, Scotland, 10/2020; the last is Bald Eagle Along the Mississippi, Near Rock Island, IL, 2022.
The first of the two paintings above is Ivan Aivazovsky’s The Ninth Wave, 1850. The second is August Macke’s Tightrope Walker from 1913 or 1914.
