What is balance?

I like humans.

I even enjoy being one myself.

And, I like to help...makes me feel like I'm doing something good for the earth.

Yet, I've learned to do so only when there's a balance between giving and receiving.

That last part is a hard one for people, in general, given the context that we grew up in that makes us less confident in that skill.

Something about a minute undercurrent that this could lead to us being self-serving, selfish a**holes.

And, you know what happens when we give too much of our wisdom, our life wayfarer knowledge without balance?

We become the opposite of a wayfarer, an explorer, a learner...

...we become an a**hole, not by being selfish, but by morphing into a dictator.

Someone who becomes a totalitarian in grinding our gears to serve others.

Tricky how that works, right?

What balance is really about

Besides destabilizing ourselves, becoming imbalanced turns us into the thing that is the complete opposite of what we intend.

Even in the opposite direction, a tyrant sooner or later, crashes and burns, and with the cage opened, learns what a wayfarer is.

So, what I've found balanced is about sounds like the sure path to becoming imbalanced...

...staying focused on what is most life enhancing to you.

Anything that distracts you from that pulls you off-center, off-balance so that eventually, you fall down and chip a tooth.

And, that includes willingly stepping into other people's poop in our programmed desire that drives us to be focused on being helpful.

Isn't unrelenting focus bad?

Again, that undercurrent of being selfish starts to rise up anytime the word focus comes up.

It leads to images of people driving themselves relentlessly and taking everyone around them down the cray cray path.

It's not that at all when you balance drive with relaxing.

Because even when you're driving on a 3,000 mile trip, you gotta rest your eyes, ass, and body every once in a while.

It also means that you don't cross over the highway lanes to pick up someone else's poop that is theirs to clean up (and of course, this excludes one who is in a life threatening situation).

Balance isn't a tit for tat, either

Giving and receiving are very rarely literally correlated.

Providing a service and getting paid for it is a good example of what we're used to.

The service usually provides some form of peace and relief (solution) that is worth something in the form of currency.

So, why is this such a hard thing for us to get our heads around when it comes to things like helping your fellow human?

Because we often don't see the benefits (receive validation) of what we give when it's outside of the business transactional context.

In so many ways, somehow, money has been the only means to convey value.

Saving someone from ending their life from suicide is often not balanced by a dollar amount, yet the impact on the world is priceless when a human rediscovers the value of staying alive with a wider, broader, deeper perspective.

Gratitude, peace, love, and all that other high vibe sh*t doesn't have a price tag (outside of businesses that provide those outcomes) because the value amount is so much greater than can be received in the form of money.

Giving something may yield receiving something completely unrelated but deeply meaningful if you know how to look beyond the surface and its immediacy.

How wayfarers avoid dictatorship

Wayfarers didn't really use money to navigate the oceans.

In fact, money's pretty useless in its immediacy when you're out in the wild.

But, they did know what most of us don't.

That they saw each stroke of their oar pulled the land closer to them, not the other way around of them moving towards the land.

They saw the world and their place in it differently.

That perspective was the door that they passed through each day.

That by standing still, the center of the world, they did sh*t to bring what they wanted closer to them.

They knew how to give this insight to themselves and receive what they wanted with little fanfare.

And, they didn't yell at others who didn't live life like that.

They knew that their way was their way and others' way were others' way.

They knew their way kept them self-sufficient and gave grace to others to find their own self-sufficiency.

They knew that others could see how they operated but they never forced them to do the same unless that way pulled them off balance and into the ocean.

And, that's what balance looks like:

I do me (give myself my vision), you do you (allow you to receive your vision), and our paths only cross if you pull me off balance.

That's the trick of giving and receiving

Giving and receiving like a wayfarer bakes in the balance of not over-giving to others then expecting to receive something from others in return, as most of us do.

They focus and stay in balance because the look at the origin and endpoint as the same...what goes on inside of themselves and not the outside world.

And, that is the secret to how the land materializes right before their eyes in a way that doesn't depend on the outside circumstances or validation to make it real.

Self-sufficiency for your giving and receiving, as you define it, is one key to staying in balance.

So, today, do you find yourself a wayfarer or a dictator?

#Balance #SelfSufficiency

I get people to reset to their true north. Like a compass, only minor recalibrations are needed to shift from the prescribed magnetic north to your true one. It's all about where you stand in your Perspective | Purpose | Perception