Living is all about maintaining your balance between two opposite positions. It’s like tightrope walking, proceeding very cautiously so that you avoid either of two equally bad situations.
You may like sweets but your doctor says that you are diabetic, so you avoid sweets. You try to find a balance between your desire and the doctor’s advice. Again, at home, you experience a disturbing situation, but when you are in your office, you find that you have to deal with the office affairs with a cool mind, so you try to find a balance between two contrary mental states. In your business, you have suffered loss and have fallen into despair, but you think; ‘I have lost the present, and if I give in to despair, I will lose the future also’. So you seek to balance the way you feel.
A student who failed in an examination thinks of killing himself due to deep frustration. But, fortunately, he remembers the well-known saying: ‘Try, try, and try again’. He then starts rethinking his future plans and says, ‘If I have lost the first chance, there is every possibility that I will be able to avail of the second chance’. He then starts studying with renewed diligence, appears in the second examination and passes with good marks. This student was able to maintain a balance between two opposite choices and was saved.
In the modern world, keeping balance is not always easy; just one negative thought or word can throw us totally off balance. We are very much like tightrope walkers. To successfully walk to the other side, we carefully place one foot after the other, holding a pole to balance. A slightly wrong step, a little too heavy on one side of the pole, then over we topple. The rope we walk is the path to our destination. Each step requires that we balance the different virtues.
People who are spiritually aware understand that the myriad threads that run through everything in this universe are each necessary. It is all these diverse threads woven together that create the wondrous tapestry of existence. Balance is what holds the diverse threads peacefully and harmoniously. The measure of a person’s practical wisdom is their capacity for balance.
This is the real art of life. This is an art which is required be everyone, be he a leader or a common man, a wealthy person or a poor man, an educated or an uneducated person.
