Why Life Is Just One Long Balancing Act
I want you to picture a tightrope walker, standing atop a large building that protrudes above the skyline of its’ surroundings. Perhaps it’s in a bustling metropolis like New York or Tokyo; maybe it’s a small provincial town in rural Switzerland set against the backdrop of the Alps.
It doesn’t matter where your mind takes you, just try to make the image as vivid as you can. Picture the weather that day and feeling the breeze that greets us whenever we find ourselves at altitude. The thinness of air and awareness of just how far there would be to fall should something go wrong.
As you picture this person, put yourself in their shoes — or bare feet depending on how you envisaged they would tackle this escapade. Think about the level of concentration required and how maintaining balance and focus is imperative. Lean too much to one side and a correction is required. Fail to adjust and you’ll fall to almost certain death.
It’s not the death part that I want you to focus on. If there’s one thing that’s certain in life it’s death. We all meet our end at some point or another, as uninspiring and morbid as that may sound. No, I want us to take a step back, carefully, and look at the moments before the fall. The point where our tightrope walker is halfway across, arms outstretched, focused on balance.
In that very moment, maintaining balance seems like the most important thing in the world, for a disruption to the equilibrium would have catastrophic consequences. It is clear to see why, there and then, it would be prudent to focus ones’ attention on achieving total balance. So why do we neglect doing so throughout the rest of our lives?
Is it not the case that life is full of moments where imbalance causes problems ranging from minor irritations to life-threatening challenges?
Identifying Imbalance
The conventional wisdom is to seek ‘the good life’: filled with positive experiences and emotions as well as creating distance from any perceived negative, ‘bad’ things; But I don’t think that’s quite how life works.
Remember that age-old expression that warns of having ‘too much of a good thing’? Well, it’s true! Think about it. Love and kindness are universally acknowledged as ‘good’ things, yet it’s possible to have or give too much.
Giving too much love to someone else can make them feel overwhelmed and drive them away which is often the exact opposite of the intention. Having too much love for someone or something other than yourself can come at great expense to your own best interests if you become absorbed in the ‘other’ and detached from the ‘self’. This is where a balance must be struck on several fronts, between the quantity and the direction, making sure not to give away too much or channel it away from oneself.
Showing too much kindness might come at the expense of your complete honesty. When a friend asks you whether or not they have the talent to pursue a career in entertainment, even though they are wholly unsuited, you encourage them rather than giving a truthful answer, at the expense of doing damage to their feelings. After years of subsequent struggle they find themselves being forced to start again having lost a great deal of money, hope and confidence that could’ve been avoided had you just scaled back the kindness and added a little honesty.
As an aside, I firmly believe that in general, the world needs much more kindness and love, so don’t let that detract you from making appropriate gestures and actions at the right time.
Life is full of everyday examples that help to illustrate the idea that you really can have too much of a good thing:
Too much exercise can lead to over-training and exhaustion or injury.
Too much free time creates the opportunity for boredom and lack of motivation.
Too many cookies undo all that hard work it took to get your abs to start showing…I’m not angry at myself, just disappointed.
“Most of modern life, all our diseases, are diseases of abundance, not diseases of scarcity” — Naval Ravikant
In the case of ambition, it’s all well and good aiming for the best-case scenario, but falling just short should not necessarily deem your efforts a failure. Focusing too much on the end goal and not enough on the progress made from the point of origin, we set ourselves up for disappointment when there is much to be proud of.
An article I recently read in the Harvard Business Review summarised that “in excess, ambition damages reputations, relationships, and can lead to catastrophic failure. On the other hand, too little ambition can make the person in question look lazy and unmotivated. Further, it can result in mediocre performance, boredom, and a bleak sense of futility.”
Ultimately, “ [when] well-balanced, ambition leads to creativity and innovation, greater levels of performance, and deeper levels of joy and satisfaction”.
Conversely, the opposite is true; it’s possible for there to be too little of a ‘bad’ thing. The absence of negative emotions and experiences can be just as damaging to the equilibrium as an excess of the good.
If you were to go through life not experiencing any challenges, you may quickly find that you are not fulfilled. In any case, you would lack the ability to build the confidence that is gained from overcoming obstacles; nor would you cultivate resilience to the setbacks faced along the way, leaving you crippled by the mere experience of a relatively minor complication.
“There is no better than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time.” — Malcolm X
For a sports team to be successful it needs to strike the balance between risking a level of attacking intent, to score goals/points, while simultaneously maintaining defensive solidity to prevent themselves from conceding. This works in reverse too, as a disproportionate focus on defence restricts scoring opportunities and if you can’t score, you can’t win.
Anyone who follows an ailing lower table sports team such as myself knows the perils of imbalance all too well.
The key is to strike a balance between good and bad, positive and negative, risky and conservative.
“All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry — all forms of fear — are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of non-forgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence,” says Eckhart Tolle.
In-built Equilibrium
Isn’t this all a bit far-fetched? To think that we can constantly seek balance in our lives, wouldn’t that take a great deal of effort to achieve? Well, not necessarily.
You may not realise it, but our bodies have a built-in mechanism that constantly changes to our adapting conditions so that the status quo is maintained.
Homeostasis, (originating from the Greek word ‘home’ meaning “similar,” and ‘stasis’, meaning “stable”), is the name given to the process by which the organisms within us constantly adjust and adapt to maintain the stable internal environment that is imperative to our survival.
The term was initially coined back in 1930 by Dr Walter B. Cannon in his book, The Wisdom of the Body. He related it to the processes by which the body ensures maintenance of steady levels of temperature and other vital conditions such as the water, salt, sugar, protein, fat, calcium and oxygen contents of the blood.
This is why the body begins to sweat when we exercise and our body temperature rises. The sweat is designed to help us cool down and regulate temperature. As we have too much heat, we automatically seek balance by invoking actions designed to do the opposite and naturally restore balance.
All of this happens within the body, without any conscious thought. Our internal regulatory system never switching off, continuously adjusting and adapting.
Maybe it’s high time we start to apply this approach to our views and emotions. To maintain balance, we must make small adjustments where necessary to avoid the extremes and craft a balanced life for ourselves.
“It follows that the balance we approve of in architecture, and which we anoint with the word ‘beautiful’, alludes to a state that, on a psychological level, we can describe as mental health or happiness. Like buildings, we, too, contain opposites which can be more or less successfully handled.”
― Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
Balancing Work and Play
I was once told the story of a man who decided that he would work as hard as he possibly could so that he would be able to retire at 60 instead of 65. He put his job first, often cancelling family plans and refusing to take time for the things he enjoyed in life. ‘There will be plenty of time to enjoy myself in retirement’ he affirmed to himself. He died from a heart attack at the age of 59.
The truth is that we don’t know how long each of us has in this world. A moment of carelessness from ourselves or another could strip our future away in an instant.
So rather than being faced with the issues of having too much or too little, I’m going to take the Goldilocks approach and seek the middle ground. A life that, on balance, I am content with.
