Balance

Balance: it’s often the key to wellness, but balancing is hard work. To stand on one leg, students of yoga work with nature; we seek out nature’s gravitational force, align our bodies and minds, and match it with our own, human gravitational center (usually located in the lower abdomen).   

Once we’ve found balance, in order to keep it, we engage large and small muscles which constantly “work” to hold posture. Our mind works to maintain attention and focus; we self-correct to avoid falling.

Finding balance while navigating a world plagued with a deadly virus is really, really hard work. Our situation is a novel one presenting novel risks and dangers: there’s no guidebook, elders and authority figures don’t have answers, doctors don’t have a cure. We are losing loved ones.

Some of us are also losing jobs as we stay home, isolated.

 The lucky ones attempt to balance working from home with educating our children at home. This task isn’t easy; we worry we may fall.

Is nature being unfair? Where is the yang to balance-out the yin? Right now, overcoming feels a little like trying to balance on one foot, and on shaky ground.

Some relief is found in knowing “We’re in this together.” We’re appreciative that modern-day technology opens lines of communication, making us feel more connected, more human.

Humans are helping other humans, and sometimes that’s the easiest place for us to start. When we humble ourselves and serve, feelings of depression and anxiety are relieved. There’s actually a thing known as a “helper’s high,” you can read more about it here: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/why-giving-is-good-for-your-health/.

 A few weeks ago, in “And the People Stayed Home,” a poem that went viral, Kitty O’Meara wrote:

 “…And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again, they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new images, and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully, as they had been healed.”

 This “imagined” end to our pandemic story seems to carry a silver lining. If humans help each other and the earth, might we be able to find balance?

 I’m taken back to a time before the COVID-19 human crisis. Last September, Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg shocked us into considering significant action to address the climate crisis. A few months later, New York State made a controversial decision to disallow earth-damaging, plastic bags for “shopping.”

 The bags don’t matter now like they did then. We’re doing a lot less shopping. That’s the thing about isolation.

 We’re also doing a lot less commuting.

 In a place like America where most of our workforce commutes, where sprawling city and town layouts mean an average commute takes almost twice as long as in other countries, that matters.  

 Transportation accounts for the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions.

Sara Sutton, CEO and founder of Flexjobs, told us a few years ago that if 50% of the American workforce worked from home only half of the time, it would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 54 million metric tons annually, the equivalent to taking almost 10 million cars off the road. (Sutton, Sara (2015). How Telecommuting Reduced Carbon Footprints at Dell, Aetna and Xerox. Retrieved from https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/245296.)

Most of us have spent the past few weeks working from home every day. While this isn’t a permanent circumstance, we can’t help but think that working from home scenarios will multiply as we move into the future.

School commutes put pressure on the environment too:

“In the United States, about 50% of all elementary students are taken to school by car. If just 20% of those students walked or biked instead, the environment would be spared of about 356,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually.” - How commuting impacts the environment, RideAmigos

Moving forward, is there potential for rates of home-schooling to increase as well?

 Just like it takes work to balance, it also takes work to see a silver lining. Maybe Kitty O’Meara has a point, though. Maybe in addition to helping each other during this pandemic, we are also helping the environment.

If we can work with nature, align our bodies and minds, and match the work of this tremendous task with the gentleness of humanity…. If we can keep balance by training our bodies and minds to self-correct and avoid falling…. If we can do these things, we’ve found the key to wellness: balance. We can move forward … with both feet on the ground.