There is much talk about balance: balancing career and family, balancing my needs and others’ needs, balancing responsibilities and indulgences, balancing  inner life and outer life.  All this balancing reminds me of playing on the teeter-totter in the playground with my brother.

In my mind’s eye, I can still see us joyfully going up and down, squealing with delight…until…one of us decided it would be fun to leave the other one suspended in the air. Then the fun stopped.  To avoid being stuck aloft, we’d call a truce, eventually, before any of our grownups got involved, and agree to stay balanced, putting a lot of effort into not moving up or down very much and not having much fun, either. Pretty soon, we’d get frustrated with this game, leave it, and move on to something else.

Frequently, I find myself feeling tugged in two directions: here or there, this or that, yours or mine…and it’s stressful.  From the stuff I read, it’s clear to me that we are constantly struggling to balance and seeking balance as a desired result. And when we have balance, then what? Will our problems be solved? Will we be happy? Will we have fewer demands on our attention? Will we be able to focus on everything we wish to focus on?

It seems to me that the problem is not achieving balance.  It seems to me that we are striving to achieve equanimity.  Semantics…perhaps.

According to Merriam-Webster, the meaning of equanimity is “evenness of mind, especially under stress.”  Balance has a number of definitions.  It can be an instrument to measure weight, it can be what remains in our checking account after we make a deposit or withdrawal, it can be maintaining of equilibrium.  The definition that spoke most eloquently to me is: “stability produced by even distribution of weight on each side of the vertical axis.” And I’m back on the teeter-totter with my brother!

Balance, especially my definition of choice, definitely has me feeling like I must control stuff out there, in the world.  Stuff like work, expectations, chores, duties, responsibilities, desires, all clamoring for my attention like the beaks of hungry baby birds.  It feels like I’m lurching from one position to another. Who’s in control?

My grandmother used to tell me that when you start painting a room, stick to the wall you’re painting and soon the job will be done.  If you paint a little here and a little there, you’ll exhaust yourself and wind up with a splotchy mess. My grandmother’s admonition always seemed to be an example of “slow and steady wins the race.” However, I am coming around to thinking that it is an apt illustration of how we live our lives in an effort to do all that we wish to do and achieve a balance.  And we seem to think that it is an impossible task to cram all that we must and/or desire to accomplish into our daily lives.

The other day as I was walking along the banks of the Hudson, with my daughter beside me kvetching all the way about how I was draggin’ her ass on a hike, I had the chance to watch the river flow.  It struck me that the river’s topography changes daily: infinitesimally through erosion, more dramatically through rock slides, and somewhere in between from the sailors, jet-skiers, and swimmers who use it recreationally or as a way to get from one place to another.  While the river may not have any control over all the monkey wrenches, figurative and literal, tossed into its waters, it appears to take it all into its flow and still make it to the ocean, day in and day out. A good illustration of equanimity: an evenness of flow even with all the submerged and surface disturbances.

As I was pondering that, I realized that when I got off that teeter-totter with my brother and moved on to something else, I was choosing to flow instead of balance. That the slow and steady of my grandmother’s room painter was choosing to simply move along and get it all done.  The problem, it occurred to me, is not one of balance, but more one of attempting to do EVERYTHING at once, in the same moment, the same hour, the same day…

So, I’m choosing to shift my perception a little to the left and try equanimity….Let’s see how that works out for me!