Remember To Keep Moving

Have you ever tried to balance yourself on one foot? If you hold yourself completely still, you can't do it. Go ahead, try. You must keep making subtle shifts and corrections just to stay upright.

That is true of keeping your balance in life as well. If you want to maintain a balanced, harmonious existence, you have to keep moving - at least a little bit.

Or here is a better example: "A seesaw on a playground is in essence on a base or fulcrum, and the fun of playing on it lies in the moving up and down, changing your position while remaining in a kind of dynamic equilibrium. You could make the whole thing more stable, perhaps, by putting the board on the ground, but the result would be both boring and meaningless. It certainly would not be balanced.

Life - even a balanced, harmonious life - was never meant to be static and unchanging. Choosing a focus and balancing our life around it as a lifelong process of choosing, adjusting and changing. Sometimes you tilt one way, sometimes you tilt another. At times you invest extra time and energy into one aspect of your life, then later you correct the balance by an emphasis on another aspect of your life. (A tilt is not really an imbalance unless it never tilts back.)

This very tilting, changing dynamic, I've found, can sometimes fool us into thinking we are losing our balance when we are actually doing alright. Sometimes we have to remind ourselves to relax a little more, to worry a litte less, trust ourselves to find a balance, to remember the big picture and not let the details overwhelm it.

If the center is in place, if we have paid a little attention to making balanced and harmonious choices, if we are not afraid to move, to change, then all we really need to do is enjoy the ride.

Up, down, with a constantly changing perspective on the canvas of your life - it's the way things should be. When I find my focus and keep my balance - I find that all is right with the world."

Thomas Kinkade - Lightposts for Living