Balance

Living life effectively is all about balance. It’s a bit like riding a bicycle on a narrow path— you want to steer away from the edge, but you can’t just jerk the handlebars. You need more than control. You need balance.

Transitions must be smooth, slow, and sure. Balance is the artful way to live. It feels comfortable, secure. It’s having the ability to see the path ahead and make only slight adjustments to stay on track. It’s the capacity to stop without immediately tipping over. But balance is delicate. Once obtained, you can hold it—sometimes for a long time. But the slightest shift—of wind, of attention, of aging—can bring disaster.

Balance is fair. Ideas and actions are weighed. It’s not reactionary—it listens first. And balance is learned. Sometimes quickly. Sometimes only after a crash. After my heart attack, most of my thoughts have revolved around excess, imbalance, and—more hopefully—the opposite of excess. It’s fair to say that an excess of fats in my diet helped pave the road to this moment. A better-balanced approach—flavor in one meal, roughage in the next—might have kept my arteries a little more open. That would’ve been balance.

Instead, here I am. Trying to regain equilibrium after falling off.

Okay. I can do this. I’ve eaten well for 69 years—time to chew cud for a while. The same principle applies to exercise. To rest. To habits of the mind.

Balance means building routines that don’t fall victim to extremes. The old truth still holds: too much of a good thing is not a good thing. And here’s the oddest part about balance: Neither the good nor the bad is supposed to dominate. This raises a question— Is it even right to try to remove all our “bad” habits? If we strip away all darkness, does the light still have shape? Remove yin from yang, and you’re left with the sound of one hand clapping. For the sake of effective applause— we should eat fatty cheesecake with our kale.