Balance

Good evening ladies and gentleman

I don’t know about you, i have always found the week or so between Christmas and new year strange. Its like a dead week, nothing really happens and you don’t really know what to do while we wait to bring in the new year and the joys, happiness and celebrations that come with it.

I get the impression that we are supposed to use this time for reflection, to look back at what has happened throughout the year, both the good and bad parts of this time. The major thing threaded throughout everything that has happened this year is i have found there is a need for balance and understanding of who we are before we can continue in a positive and fulfilling way. We have been treating the past, present and future as generally separate entities, but should they be connected? Is one more important than the other- should the information it provides be seen as so much more relevant to life? Maybe they are all linked? Should we risk losing something beautiful right now- to make what we think will be a better future?

If we look  through the complexities of who we are in modern society, we arguably have developed three different personalities, through how we lived and loved in the past, how we live mindfully, powerfully and honestly in the present moment and what we imagine will come of us in the future.  However, as we live in the present moment, seeing only what is right now, its not that simple. We see the events of our past, we remember the thoughts that defined us, feelings that affected us, regardless of whether we loved them or are still haunted by them. The decisions we made we think of now to be laughable- “why did i do that?”

This, to me, is regret. We think about the past, often living in the decisions we made, for the results weren’t as we hoped, or affected the way we felt about life, in a positive or negative way, even if only for a day. We need this in the present, for while we can’t change what has happened and the decisions we have made, we can learn from them. Every event,  good or bad is experience and its this that gives us a better understanding of who we are, what we want for life and who we want in our lives. The past is forever a learning curve to the present and the relationship between the two is the key to the future- the key to becoming that “ultimate” version of yourself you imagine being, to being part of “life domination.”

This idealistic future, the “life domination” is where the problems of being out of balance can have its biggest effect. In an age of information with an virtual encyclopedia available at a few clicks, it seems ever so easy to think you can predict your future, to see what is coming. Its like taking the easy route, becoming so convinced that what you are doing right now, based on the failures or successes of the past, can only lead you down one path- the one to the future we persist at. Yet as we know, the easy path, isn’t always the right path and often, not the only path we take. Whether we like it or not- we cannot predict the future. (i know, shocking.)

Nonetheless, we persist, for while we feel the past is different to who we have become in the present, the future, in a way is a dramatic change again, to that person, to the intended brilliance we hope to become. Why do we do this? As when all is said and done, we believe the combination of these three people is at its core who we are. Even though sometimes this balance is so hard to find, we strive for it regardless of the obstacles we put in front of it.

An obstacle that can often affect this “flow” is desire, like someone who turns up 2 hours too late drunk out of their mind to a carefully constructed party. This desire, these moments that “jeopardize the plan,” that lead to not knowing what is going to happen 5 or 10 steps ahead has an effect on us all by itself. As we concentrate more and more time to this need to be “ahead,” the present falls into insignificance, until desire appears and throws everything into question. All of that work seems so meaningless with a spanner like that thrown in the works. Yet in a way, the “problem” of desire is us showing that we are so much more than the robots we might sometimes want to be. Desire isn’t a bad thing, its “you” simply trying to push up for air.

Hence the balance and its place in modern life. Its all fairly meaningless if we spend time just existing and not living, working solely on what we expect to happen in the future, or concentrating on replicating a feeling from the past. In particular with the past, its almost a disrespect to the brilliantly emotional, evocative experiences that just made us want to shout from the rooftops how fucking good they made us feel. We cannot predict the future because the future is constantly changing, nothing is concrete. The moment you decided to get up this morning at 7:45 rather than at 3 in the afternoon set a course of events in motion, that with every little decision is forever changing the path you walk. Scale that up and the future beyond the next decision seems much less important, for its impossible to know how you will feel, the context that will be affecting your thinking and the utter beauty you could be experiencing.

Life is full of obstacles stopping us who we want to be and doing what we want to do. In particular it means that it can be much harder to find balance. I spend so long on Thinking Evolution going on about what has happened and the things that might or might not happen in the future, expecting that in someway, we cannot achieve true success, and be what is considered truly “happy” until we get to this point, or find a way of replicating that previous feeling. Life is a learning process though, and i was wrong. Life is a balance beam we are just trying to not fall off of. To do this, the past, present and future all need to know their role in the production.

To not replicate the past but respect it. To be honest that what we had, no matter how brilliant it was is over, to move on and work on what is going on right now, to live presently and mindful of what we are doing, who we are being and where we are going. Through this, we can feel and see that the future is an unknown and that is…scary. But that’s ok. Its good to be scared, because it shows what we are doing has meaning to it. We see only as far ahead as we need to, for the surprises of the good or bad, are part of those moments that define us. We need to communicate across all aspects of life, for in its own way, this is what life is all about.

This is…living.

How do you feel about balance? Should the past, present and future be linked? or are they separate? What is balance to you? Is it ever possible to get that perfect point on the balance beam?

Yours, with love as always.

DR

Random motivational picture.