On Balance

A relaxed post-Diwali day at office and a cursory glance to a wall frame with the zen pebbles stack (you know how it looks but below it is anyway) sparks this chain of thought.

Yes it's about balance. But there’s a whole lot going on there.

Notice how precarious it is - those tiny pebbles keeping the entire structure together. The contact points a fraction of an mm - a slight shift and everything will come crumbling down. It's like those physics constants which need to be precise to the nth decimal place for this universe to exist! Imagine the chances!

So if you find balance elusive, I understand and empathise. And if you have ‘found it’ then I understand the precariousness of it too.

There’s more to this elusiveness and precariousness - seems it's a lot to do with our own concept of balance and what comes packaged with it. Let me illustrate with conceptions I have lived through:

In this one, it looks more like neat cubes to be stacked on top of each other - like the ones kids play with. Balance, within this mental model, is a sequence of things you do to ‘achieve’ it. And it's there to stay unless a blunt force (a stroke of bad luck) disrupts it.

You start with the ‘building blocks’ (ah the language!) - like laying a strong foundation (degree? work experience? skills the world values?) to the house you wanna build, and put up the walls to guard your little world, filling it with curated memories to preserve. Growing up, I saw proof of this - the lawyer landlord who strived through poverty to earn not just wealth but also the respect of the community - I used to dream of owning a Maruti omni like them one day! - or an uncle who similarly transformed his life by sheer hard work and discipline.

Oh the fragility of this! For what I hoped would be neat blocks, I got handed over these random pebbles by life, each with its own unique curves and shape. The frustration when a pebble won’t rest and the fatigue of trying again and again. It's supposed to sit snugly on the lower one so I can go on to place the next one on top. The hurry & anxiousness of it. And the futility of it when the entire thing comes crashing down! Only to start all over again.?

And even in those brief moments when it's ‘stable’, the uneasiness of the fault lines only I could feel. That this might not stay and it's only a matter of time! That hollowness while the world admired the stack they saw from a distance. “My son earns ‘x’ money every year”, mom boasts - something which was beyond imagination growing up - and the unease I feel every time I hear it because of what it implies - tomorrow if I don’t earn this money, will my worth in the eyes of the world go down? More importantly, how will it be in my own eyes? How much of my identity is entangled with such notions??

The more I hold on to the notion of a perfect fit and stability, the more I get perturbed by the imperfections in each pebble - why it's not the right one or wish it did not have those edges which are threatening the balance.?

This stability got shaken up when I lost my father in 2014. That period of internal churn I think led to me leaving a high income stable job and shifting gears to pursue what I felt is closer to my heart though for a few years my earnings dropped to a quarter of what I was otherwise making. That decision not just gave me a sense of fulfilment but has also proved to be rewarding in the long run.

Life had thrown another curve ball when my wife got diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. After a long period of blissful ignorance and lull, it reared its head again post COVID vaccination and further loosened the remaining vestiges of the concept of ‘balance’ I was holding onto. I read about VUCA/BANI/Black Swan/Anti-fragility - these concepts were made real by life and have moved us gradually toward the acceptance part of the Kubler-Ross curve.

Not that this ‘way of being’ is alien to us. I recall myself playing with my son, building random sand structures on a beach - all that effort in building something, fully knowing that the next wave may just wash it all away. Did that knowledge deter us from doing it anyway? Why endure the trauma, why endeavor when you will have to start all over again.? Yet this question never occurs.?

What’s happening here? Why is there no anxiety, or the fear of collapse? Is it because it was just play and nothing great was ‘expected out of it’? Is it only because play is low stakes and work is serious, high stakes??

But we do bring a lot of attention to play too (more I would argue). We don’t intentionally kick down on those sand structures on the beach. We pour our hearts into it and want to do well. Isn’t that enough for work too??

What is indeed different I suspect is the level of acceptance we bring with us to the vagaries of life and the degree of attachment to certain outcomes which were never under anyone’s direct control. When things don’t go my way, it's tempting for me to slide into narratives of psychological comfort - I am OK, you are not OK! But these narratives don’t withstand reality. Reality pushes to confront questions I have not been asking myself.

Am I aware of my expectations whether it's from play, work or life in general and what they are doing to me? How much have I tethered my identity to those expectations? While I chase balance within the walls of the world I operate in, am I even aware of how these walls came to be in the first place and the forces which shape them??

Forces which surprisingly I have been carrying over a long past and which often have nothing to do with the situation I conveniently blame. The external triggers (pleasant/unpleasant) only serve as? pointers to patterns I have been nurturing sub-consciously. And as I uncover these patterns, I find myself standing where I started my journey from - like in Paulo Coelho’s Alchemist - albeit with a little more peace and a somewhat clearer view of life and reality.