This balance too is elusive

Sometimes I feel like my brain is a collage of badly transferred temporary tattoos, overlapping, slightly out of focus, yet infuriatingly impacting my mood. I can’t decide if I want to zoom in on one or the other, wipe them all out, or try to make them come together as a whole.

This is how I feel right now.

It’s not just the ongoing violence in so many places in the world and the knowledge that my tax money is paying for much of it. It is also not exactly feelings of powerlessness or stagnation or grief.

It is that. But as we are living our lives against the backdrop of profound, existential, structural pain, there are other feelings too. Smaller rifts that are felt deeply, personal losses that take up space, successes, joys, achievements, health crises, experiences of both frustration and glee. It is hard to hold it all.

Balance, of course, is the key.

And even so, I am starting to think maybe not in the way we usually talk about it: like this elusive static stretched out condition of nirvana that, once achieved, doesn’t go away. This, in my experience, is not possible. It is also not, I think, necessary or good.

To be in this world and of this world, we need to find different types of balance. Between acceptance and speaking out. Between self-care and community support. Between seeking beauty and calling out suffering.

This balance too is elusive. But it was never meant to be permanent or still. Striving for balance is the human condition: the way in which we learn and relearn to be with each other and the planet, over and over again.