Living a Balanced Life

One of the most important principles of "living deliberately" - a phrase that Henry David Thoreau used to describe his reason for moving to Walden Pond - is that of BALANCE. Earthiness-and-spirituality, humor-and-gravity, openness-and-boundaries, masculinity-and-femininity and head-and-heart are examples of contrasting traits that need balancing in our lives. Aristotle spoke of living by the "Golden Mean," and Gautama Buddha referred to such balance as "the Middle Way." Navajo (Dine') people practice Hozho, an approach that recognizes BEAUTY as a chief trait of balanced living. In our current era, there are several ways in which our lives are generally very UNBALANCED. One is related to the amount of passive entertainment we consume each day. This need not mean simply TV shows, movies, or video games. It may also include internet surfing, or an excessive reliance on social networking to fill the gaping hole of unfulfillment we so often feel inside. As a balance to this kind of passivity, we need a sense of discipline, in which we limit these activities in order to focus on OUR OWN creativity and OUR OWN inspirations, which depend on a degree of fasting from the more passive approach to life. Indeed, creative thought requires a degree of solitude as well. To this end, I find it helpful to set a daily limit to the amount of time I will spend on internet surfing (say, 20 minutes), or - and this is a big one - a limit to the number of times I'll check each day for Facebook messages and "Likes" (say, 3 to 5 times a day). This kind of discipline helps us regain our poise and centeredness. It also allows us, as earlier thinkers have pointed out, to become a sort of human embodiment of a finely-tuned musical instrument: neither too loose nor too tight. Such is the fruit of a life of balance.

Photo: The Balanced Rock at sunset; Arches National Park, UT; September 27, 2013

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