Keeping Our Balance

 This week's quote reads, "To keep your balance, you must keep moving."

Nope. Sorry, whoever wrote this, I don't agree. In order to find our balance, and then maintain it, the first necessity is stillness. Or at least, that is what I have found.

Because if we are constantly moving, how are we to find any kind of still centre? For most of us, the first half of life (and probably later than that) is all about keeping moving - about discovering who we are, what we love, what we're good at, finding our "tribe" of people, whether those be family, friends, our faith or some other community, or a mixture of all of them. The first half of life is all about striving, achieving, moving on, moving up, moving, moving.

Successful people can run away from themselves for years. They (and I count my younger self among them) skate across the surface of their lives, achieving, dazzling. It often takes some traumatic event (the loss of a loved one, or a devastating failure) to bring us up short. When this happens (and it generally does, at some point in our lives) our balance is lost and we find that there is no still centre around which we can regain it.

If we are lucky (and I was) there will be some wise friend or mentor around to give us advice. Which, for many of us, will be to stop moving, to sit in silence, to simply be. I have found that this (together with walking alone in nature) are the only ways of keeping my balance, and of discovering a new balance, a quiet centre. I was afraid of loneliness for much of my life and found the company of people infinitely preferable. But I believe that my decisions to quit smoking and drinking, combined with my interior spiritual journey in the early 2010s (still continuing) helped me to welcome solitude as a time to think, to reflect, to spend time in my own company, to come nearer to the Divine. These days, when I spend too much time in the company of too many people, I need a lot of time alone to come back to myself, to regain my balance.

True extroverts will find this hard to understand, but introverts and ambiverts will be reading with little cries of recognition. I'm not saying "I want to be alone" like Greta Garbo, but that I need a balance between being with people and being on my own. These days, I have found a balance I am comfortable with: I like to spend most of my daytime hours alone, working, or writing, or crocheting, but enjoy coming back into congenial company during the evening, with Maz and Luna. I love spending time with my best friend, and with my close family, but drop back into my customary routine with - no, relief is the wrong word. It is like slipping one's feet into a pair of comfortable slippers and sitting in one's favourite armchair, deeply relaxed, after a busy day.

How do you keep your balance?