On my way to Lowe’s last Sunday, thinking about the love in my life, it struck me suddenly: it’s not about what we have or don’t have, what we want or don’t want, what we do or don’t do, what we say or don’t say, what we feel, think or don’t. It’s all about the paradox of balance.
Balance is a stable psychological or emotional state. Whether we’re involved in romantic love or parental love or sibling love or love of mankind, is there ever such a thing as stability? Thus, balance remains elusive even though it seems at times to be attainable.
We feel as though there must be balance because harmony is momentarily achieved, but we know most harmony is short-lived. Therefore, balance becomes a paradox in that it seems to be self-contradictory, but it can be understood or explained by some level of our psyches or emotions.
Balance is the precarious middle of the road we pretend to pursue in our pendulum journey to extremes. Balance is like meniscus, the crescent shape of surface tension between fluid and air. Balance becomes uncertain certainty, hopeful faith.
To add to the paradox of balance, consider the following quotation by Frank Herbert in which he expresses initially that balance is easily grasped, but then he equates its understanding to that of riding waves by sensation and not by intellect. We intuitively understand what he is trying to say but cannot put our proverbial fingers quite on the explanation with precision.
“There’s no secret to balance. You just have to feel the waves.”
Balance also carries the definition of weighing mentally, making comparisons. Balance seeks a stabilizing influence. We try to make sense of our relationships by finding a sense of balance in them because maybe that’s as good as it gets. When we take stock, we realize that relationships are in flux, and the flux is ironically in balance. There seems to be a cyclic effect, as though we are a part of something larger than we can know until we recognize that there is a larger sense of balance ruling our relationships though we may not be able to see this except in retrospect.
Consider the poem by Anne Sexton. In it she achieves not only a perfect balance in her lines and parallel imagery, but also a balance in seasons and migration–all becoming symbolic of the speaker’s journey in taking stock, doing a balance sheet for a relationship she has experienced. She even represents balance in making distinctions, as between innocence and experience, between ease and mania, between intimacy and distance.
The Balance Wheel
Where I waved at the sky
And waited your love through a February sleep,
I saw birds swinging in, watched them multiply
Into a tree, weaving on a branch, cradling a keep
In the arms of April sprung from the south to occupy
This slow lap of land, like cogs of some balance wheel.
I saw them build the air, with that motion birds feel.Where I wave at the sky
And understand love, knowing our August heat,
I see birds pulling past the dim frosted thigh
Of Autumn, unlatched from the nest, and wing-beat
For the south, making their high dots across the sky,
Like beauty spots marking a still perfect cheek.
I see them bend the air, slipping away, for what birds seek.- Anne Sexton
Sexton has her speaker imitate what is natural, i.e., waving like a bird, to sense what it is to be a part of the flow of existence, to feel in the wave of her hand a sense of balance that the elusive birds seem to have mastered without striving. They do not waste time trying to understand their world as they are too involved in living in it. They are the beauty and the joy of the world and the balance between earth and sky.