#024 - Balance - pt. 2

JULY 2021

Straddling life’s balance beams.

Your life will always seem like a balancing act because (shocker) it is! It’s a balance between commitments. Commitments to yourself and commitments to others. I believe this because it is true in my own life. The truth is that when someone lets me down or fails to live up to their commitments to me, it used to cause me to question my self-worth. This is an unhealthy reaction that I have to be aware of consciously. This is why being secure and fighting insecurity is important. Secure foundations are always the beginning of any major life-construction project. 

The more secure you are, the less it will hurt you when others let you down. The less secure you are in yourself, your status, and your well-being, the more likely you are to perceive balance as a threat. It is really easy to be only one way, but as with most broad strokes of any paintbrush, only being one way is rarely all-inclusive. This is why duality is more all-encompassing, so balance is healthy. Don’t mistake this with me condoning murder or any other immoral actions or morality in general, for that matter, but think as more of a plus or minus on either side of a central line. 

In gymnastics, the balance beam can be tricky to master, but those who do are seen effortlessly walking along doing impressive acrobatics. These flips are along centers of gravity and require strong balance to perform successfully. But as with most athletic endeavors, this requires practice, patience, and the tenacity of achievement to master. Personal balance beams can be just as difficult. When one falls off a personal balance beam, the ability to stand up and remount takes courage and strength to reestablish a strong foothold. Your foothold in life, that is.

When a balance beam is left abandoned, your conflict with others will increase exponentially. Think about the perspective shift. When you are balancing upon a beam raised in the air, you have the perspective to see both sides of the floor beneath you. Applying this to personal balance is important for both sides of another’s perspective. The middle ground in any argument offers resolution to agreeing parties, though conversely when only one side gets their way, the other is always marginalized at the expense of the majority. The founders of the United States called these checks and balances, and in accounting, this is called the separation of duties part of GAAP or generally accepted accounting principles. These GAAP rules are designed to keep corporations in check but also balance businesses' outward vs. inward-facing parts.

The US political system provides not just two but a third check to balance our system of governance. These three branches of government work together to provide for the common good of all people - even marginalized ones. This works in practice with extremes fighting to find the middle ground and has worked because one party has never had power for any significant amount of time. Whether liberal or conservative, democrat or republican, an equilibrium is always forced into play when one side gets their way for too long. The ideological swing from shifts of power oftentimes has devastating effects on the innocent bystander.   

In accounting, balances can be distilled to a balance sheet to reconcile debits and credit accounts. Separation of duties is a corporate concept in which the person who requests a check is different from the person who writes the check. This is to help prevent a less-than-moral person from stealing or remove the temptation from someone who may fall off the beam, so to speak. So, when straddling the balance beams of life, it is important to see both sides of whatever you are trying to balance and have healthy guardrails to prevent you from going off in the extreme in either direction.

Balance is dawn and dusk in any situation—not quite a day, but not quite the night. In Psychology and medicine, statistical outliers cause plenty of problems. This is why the side effects of medications can be hilariously long. If one person has an adverse reaction, it must be warned against to prevent litigation. But we all statistically fall within that faithful arc tangent line known as a bell curve - meaning the majority tend to hover toward the middle of any curve.

The Lord our God is one - a theological tangent. 

One of the most special and profound things about Judaism is that it was the first religion to define a singular God and the first to be chosen by said God. Since the God who created us is the same God who spoke to Abraham and Moses and came in the flesh as Jesus, the message from the beginning of time has been a message of unity for humankind. However, with the introduction of original sin into the argument, the original plan was tampered with, altered, and changed so that God could no longer walk among us and ultimately had to come back as a human to save us once and for all. The latter is the foundation of Christianity based on God's promise of a messiah to the Jewish people.

It was as if, at this moment, God was making up for taking a chance on humanity, not making a parental mistake by allowing sin to happen - for if a child falls for merely walking, is the parent to blame? No, the child falls, the parent protects, and God makes up for taking this chance by becoming the protector God of Israel. But perhaps in the grand narrative, God, who is all-knowing, knew that this was our ultimate fate and, therefore, had a plan from the beginning. He had to; he’s God. 

Now, let’s unpack all of that. God created humanity but also created a fallen angel who became the source of evil for humanity. Satan plays his part as the fallen angel Lucifer to provide the balance that seems to be, at this point, inherently introduced into our DNA from the very beginning via free will. So, with this in mind, balance may be the most important thing about life itself - one that our creator, God, programmed into us from conception.

As far out as that thought is, it is why spirituality may provide the balance needed in your life - a safe place to restore and recharge in an inherently evil world. God did not create the world to be evil, but instead, evil showed up when God left humans to their own devices. He did not leave man not on his own but apart or separate until the introduction of Jesus. Jesus becomes the bridge of life, reunited with the source, and a tap into the holy spirit to tie us over until eternal reunification. I wrote most of the above while on a spiritual high.

So tap into the holy spirit of Jesus, which ultimately connects us to the creator God and connects us all. Ultimately, through this unity, you will attract better people who can ultimately help you along your journey. God and Jesus will help provide the people that will balance your life.

A circus of commitments.

Since balance is about juggling, not just two but oftentimes ten or more commitments, it should never be reduced to only two things. Duality and dichotomies are made to be separate and should be balanced wisely. To have a bad thought and never act on it is balance, and imbalance shows up quite violently on both sides of the extreme. This is why the middle ground is where to stand not only in life but when perched upon life’s balance beam. Once again, strong foundational support is the beginning of the best ending.

From there, look at the commitments that are presented to you. I use the archaic method of sticky notes and color-coding. To me, it is about knowing your limitations first, balancing your expectations secondly, and then sorting your commitments last. It could look like knowing that your time each week is limited, letting the people around you know so they can hold you accountable for deadlines, and ordering your commitments by importance, time sensitivity, and difficulty level. I always do the hardest things first and devote the most time to them. Then, trickle down to the easy and least time-consuming tasks.

That way, I can end up doing something I enjoy or that isn’t as mentally taxing to balance the hard task I hopefully just completed. Keyword: hopefully. 

This is what juggling on a balance beam looks like for me, though it is different for everyone. God, through Jesus, offers the same balance. There is the idea that discredits God to most atheists, the idea being that bad things happen, so thus, therefore, there is no God. Balance offers a different interpretation, for if there was no source of abundant good, how could we define or apply a description to the absence of good or evil? If there was no inherent good in humanity, how could we define the evils of this world? If there was no inherent value to life as God has given us or evolutionary chance as the atheist believes, then why would murder be placed at the highest level of all atrocities? Animals murder other animals, so it's natural, right? See how dangerous this thought path can be?

Religion gave us human rights, which balance a chaotic natural world. We humans, especially Christians, are charged with the care and maintenance of this world, using our inherent good to balance out the evils and chaos.

The fact that life strives towards the center does not make a person less convicted but allows their convictions to carry both sides of an argument. Perhaps there are morality issues at play when it comes to balance and a moral imperative to balance an individual's life. 

I could write pages about different systems concepts that work only with balance. Economics is governed by a law of balance called supply and demand, which always meet at an equilibrium point. When an economy is unbalanced, goods and resources are wasted, and human life is impacted as a result. In psychology, chemical imbalances in the human brain cause a myriad of disorders, and disastrous consequences happen when an aircraft’s wing becomes unbalanced. 

Life is made up of balance. It seems the world is getting warmer, and future generations will have to balance emissions and sea level rise to combat environmental imbalance. All of this, however, begins with us all balancing our own lives and becoming good, well-balanced neighbors first. A heavy weight can tip a scale in any direction, and heavy burdens make journeys difficult. So, shed the weight because we’re all on life’s journeys. After all, we have a planet to run.

More tomorrow! Thank you for reading!