Equilibrium is a state in which opposing forces or influences are balanced. Today is the Equinox and the opposing forces of day and night, light and dark are balanced for a moment. It seems like a perfect day to reflect on equilibrium.
I don’t think human beings were designed to experience sustained equilibrium. We seem to do best and feel best when we are gracefully swinging between opposites, not stuck in some midpoint or resisting movement because someone has said stillness is the ideal. We love movement…we are e-motional beings. Our hearts are never still.
Should our minds be still? Meditation refers to monkey mind but it is not about monkey movement. It is about monkey chatter and monkey screeching. Monkeys seem to always be moving in right relationship to equilibrium as they swing and leap from limb to limb. Meditation is a quieting of the chatter, not the stilling of the movement. Meditation asks us to focus on the moving of our breath but wisdom comes when we can focus on the movement of our thoughts.
I love the movement of my thoughts. I practice thinking as elegantly choreographed movement between varied, often opposing questions, perspectives and ironies. I swing between knowing and not knowing. I am the mover and the moved and I am never still but I have learned to do this active movement from an awareness of equilibrium.
I am rarely in the place of equilibrium, but I know it exists in me and that is the key. I dance around and through this midpoint of opposites, my inner equilibrium. I don’t seek it as an endpoint or a place of resting. I live in a living lemniscate, the figure eight image of infinity with its crossing point. This image brings a new complexity to the lemniscate but our times are about greater complexity…nothing is a simple as it was.
When I am thinking wisely and creatively, my mind is quiet, beautiful, strong and fluid, but it is not still.
Opposing forces can have a brief kiss at the point of equilibrium but then one must enter into the loving experience of the other. For example, our times are really asking for us not to balance the opposing forces of masculine and feminine and not to deny the value of either but to explore the meaning and purpose of each by entering into the opposing experience in order to learn, assimilate and adapt. The same with art and science. Spirit and matter. Youth and age. Body and soul. Comfort and disease. I don’t want to live in a one-sided world, nor in a balanced world. I want a world full of grace and grace is about flow.
All I’ve written so far is about our own soul life where we can aspire to be both choreographer and dancer.
If we do this well, we can hopefully take this out of the inner life and move it into our social life of differences and oppositions. Not so easy, but, oh, so necessary in our times.
In writing this post, I have explored my relationship to equilibrium, inner movement, meditation, wisdom, inner quiet. I’ve written thoughts, I have never had before. I feel glad to have done this work of exploring my relationship to inner equilibrium. I hope my thoughts offer you some inspiration. Won’t you please do the same and share your thoughts on your inner equilibrium in the comments below.
Won’t you please do the same and share your thoughts on your inner equilibrium in the comments below.
