If you’re a cook (or a fan of TV cooking shows), you understand the pursuit of “balanced flavor.” Sometimes a little bit of sourness adds the right amount of acidity to a dish to make it delicious. Sometimes, it’s the harshness of salt that brings out the flavors. Maybe our lives are like a well-seasoned dish and require some of this in order to be complete.
How does the harshness of the world help balance your life?
Sometimes, balance is ridiculous. We go to absurd lengths to make sure things are balanced, when they really should not be. Sometimes, we need to take the potato off of the spoon and let things fall to the table.
What balance do you need to let go of because the pursuit of it is simply ridiculous?
In Chinese philosophy dating back to the I Ching of 700 BCE, Yin and Yang are opposite and complementary energies. They are fundamentally balanced with one another, and interdependent. One cannot exist without the other, and nothing can be purely one or the other; together they create a whole.
What are complementary and interdependent things in your life that bring you wholeness?
Sometimes, despite the odds, we achieve a balance that seems impossible.
What are the ways that you have stretched to balance when it seemed impossible to do so?
There are times when everything seems perfectly balanced. At those times, we should ask ourselves at whose expense our own balance is coming. Are there people holding us up? Are there people whose lives are unbalanced by our seeking balance?
At whose expense does your balance come?
