Balance

How do you maintain balance? Do you consciously try? Many human beings live like body-surfers on the tides of change. Pummeled by storm tides and stalled by lack of inspiration or desire.

Balance requires effort in a Universe which tends toward chaos. Our bodies naturally deteriorate with bad habits of unbalanced exercise and poor diet. Encountering victims of true poverty will illustrate this point. People in poverty who are relatively young by educated middle-class standards look decades older and are often toothless from lack of dental care. Their lives are lived in imbalance, fed by ignorance and social injustice.

Balancing in the real world requires education and consciousness. Understanding how the body works requires studying the owner's manual which is now quite detailed, thanks to modern medical science. Understanding how physiology shapes and maintains the human mind gives the mindful person tremendous tools to balance stress and anxiety. Psychotherapy, psycho-pharmacology, yoga and meditation are examples.

Life without balance can be seen as exhilarating and colorful. Anyone who has read an autobiography of a 'colorful life' will soon find that the subjective experience of a life without balance is not really enjoyable in an overall sense. Those who come out of a life of ups and downs to a life of balance usually say they prefer the latter. 

Lack of balance usually displays itself as a life of one crisis after another. Some choose to live their lives this way. Many more do it just by habit or circumstance. In my own experience, I saw early in my life that living from one crisis to the next was simply a replay of my parents' methodology, which I had come to dislike as I matured. My focusing on what is going wrong at any given time undermines my ability to look ahead to a future which is generally right for me. When I establish balance in my life, no one event or circumstance overshadows my path to that state of rightness, a state of peace and joy. Balance is at the core of wellness.