We All Need Balance

Left foot and right foot, when we walk, the swing of our arms. Talking and listening. Watching and observing. Sitting and standing. Healthy food and junk food. All things which we need to balance, don’t have too much of this, eat more of that. Everything in our lives needs balance. This doesn’t always occur in the same moment. More or all of one and then switching to all of the other. Sometimes most of one and a small amount of the other. Now I don’t know the full details but I see something that represents this well.

I was exposed to Feng Shui when I was younger and some of the ideas of flow and balance and how they interconnect. And I may have observed some of the basic ideologies unknowingly through-out my short/long life. (My point here is it feels like forever when you are in the moment but then in the next moment you realise how much of your life you haven’t lived yet. Or have, if you are older than me.) But the realisation I am coming to right at this very moment is the fact that we need balance in everything. And that there is no better representation than Yin and Yang. If you read my previous blog post you would have seen same basic ideas talking about needing time for me.

And that was referring to how I noticed an imbalance and I needed to do something about that. To restore the balance and re-centre myself. And while thinking about this there was imagery coming to mind on how to best represent this and I thought of two things. The first is very simple and easy to find and in fact might represent this in the best way. The Yin and Yang, both sides, opposites, that are connected, flow around each other and are fundamentally within the two and thus connected. Every moment and action is represented in this simple image. In life you get times where it is the good mixed with the bad. The bad with a silver lining. The straight up good or bad.

We need both to deal with things as well. To get through each day, year and stage of our lives. Without one we cannot fully appreciate the other. As I am typing this I had a chill weekend starting with a family dinner that I cooked. It was the good with a small hint of the bad as I stuffed up the ingredients. The overall weekend of listening to the rain outside while watching TV almost completing 2 seasons of a show start to finish. But contrasting this to the last few months this is the complete opposite. Being out somewhere doing something with someone for the entire weekend and parts of the week. Not that I am complaining at all as I happily did those things and enjoyed the moments. But I needed to change that and change the flow of things to re-centre myself. Get myself back to the middle and ready for either end of the scale again.

So with all this in mind I feel so good right now. Ready to take on anything again. And it feels good. I feel ready to be able to support my friends to the fullest again which I knew deep inside I had not for a while. And I think part of that is also that I had not been dealing with the effect of my financial situation as well as I thought. But I know my position, fully accept it and am centred ready to climb the mountains and valleys as they come towards me. Don’t take anything I said above as a reason to change around me. It is purely that I was partway through a cycle that everyone goes through and had lost the balance. Now that I am at this state I am ready.

That previous paragraph was actually my closing for this blog but as the rain falls harder I must mention something more. The Ancient Chinese had many things figured out in relation to life and it’s challenges. Much like the Ancient Greeks and Egyptians had the stars and technology figured out. But in the recent months I have learnt that they had a few things that are still helpful tools today. Yin and Yang, some parts of Feng Shui (depending on your views) and the I Ching. The first and the latter of that list I have explored to some extent and will again in the future. But this moment is my further realisation as to how much the Yin and Yang is applicable to everything. And how I will apply this further as I step through each day of my life. Of course to properly close this off (ah hmmm, again) would be to provide a Chinese proverb. Now I don’t know if this is Chinese or not but I had seen this years ago and am fairly certain it bared the name of the Dalai Lama, but research confirms it is definitely in a movie.

“Worry is like interest paid in advance on a debt that never comes due.”
– George Lang
1997 The Spanish Prisoner