The ONE Thing You Have to Master in Life
Understand, appreciate, master it: balance
You might not believe in anything in this world but there exist laws and rules in this universe that you simply can’t deny. They are bigger than all of us together and they don’t care about if you like them or not. Gravity. Temperature. Physical forces. They are all real and they work. You can try to bend them, override them (at least for a short amount of time), rebel against them, but ultimately they will come back to you and take their position. So what should you do instead? First of all you have to know about them, learn to appreciate and align with them, and finally, make them your partner in everything you do. In short: master them.
One of these laws is balance — and I truly believe it’s the most powerful of all of them.
One of these laws is balance — and I truly believe it’s the most powerful of all of them.
Balance has always been out there and we can see it happening everyday in our lives. Balance is also collaborating closely with the concept of opposites. The battle between good and evil has been the topic of so many stories, books, operas, and hollywood movies. Or think about the everyday wonder of night and day. Light and dark. Loud and quiet. Limited and boundless. Life and death. These opposites are polarizing, easy to understand, based on core believes and values of all of us. Often their assessment is individual and influenced by many parameters. People simply love them.
But I believe in another truth: extremes are bad.
But I believe in another truth: extremes are bad. Working is great, but too much of it results in a burn-out. Leisure time is fantastic, but only in the right dose. Sun is amazing, but it might burn you. Serving and taking care of others is one of the greatest things you can do in life, but you may not forget about yourself completely. So while I was thinking about this over the past months, one question came to my mind: does an ultimate balance point exist? And if yes, what does it look like?
1st Concept: linear (basic scale)
Let’s start with a simple concept, the scale. The function is very basic and efficient, namely to define when opposites are even. But how about to other opposites, like black and white. If black is one extreme, and white is the other … is “grey” your balance point?
This result is quite unsatisfying and simply doesn’t make sense the more you think about it. Hmmm… so the basic scale concept will not work in this context. Next step: having shared my thoughts with my fiancee (the best thing you can do btw!), she designed a different concept.
2nd Concept: Spinning top
I love this concept. Think about life as a spinning top. The balance point is right in the center. This is the place where all elements and forces are aligned. The whole construction is gravitating around this one focus point.
If it get’s out of balance, it falls over. This means, the more a force is drifting away from the center point, the more it get’s out of balance until it potentially reaches the point where it totally crashes. So, what you want to do is to focus on the center point, protect it from distractions, prevent it from crashing. If you understand life as a spinning top one thing becomes obvious: it is easier to get something out of control, than to make it spin beautifully. And this is especially true if you don’t know how to play the game, you’re not aware of the rules, or you get too easily distracted from manipulations.
3rd Concept: Adaption of the scale concept
Having understood the concept of the spinning top, I still wasn’t 100% satisfied. What about the battle of good and bad? Don’t we all want to see the good side winning in the end? Thus, shouldn’t the light side be the balance point after all? Well, maybe it is!
Example: imagine you want to loose weight, so in the beginning your starting point is the left “dark” side which equals to “I’m too fat, I’m feeling bad.”. The next action steps will make you change your nutrition and work out at the gym regularly. Finally, you will end up at the center point where you feel great, energized and healthy. Wow! Goal achieved, welcome to the center point, the “light”. Now three things can happen:
1) you’re able to stay healthy and make it your new life style (staying balanced)
2) you will fall back into old habits and gain weight again (back to the left dark side)
3) or the dark side on the “right” will attack you from the other side and pull you to the other extreme of reducing your nutrition too much so you end up with malnutrition. Or you will simply exaggerate your training and you’ll end up with less energy and in worst case you will hurt yourself.
There always exist two extremes.
So how does this concept correlate with the spinning top? Well, let’s have a look:
Imagine you simply fold up the line, dark side on dark side. If you do this with many “balance lines” and you put them next to each other, you will end up with one “light” center point, surrounded by a circle of “darkness”. Now we’re back at the spinning top.
The beauty is: the balance point is agile and adjustable! It is smart, it knows what you really need. It cares about you more than you could care about yourself and it tells you what to do, you just have to learn to listen to it and set the right action steps. Learn how to collaborate with it!
Remark: Standstill
Life means action, movement, energy, flow, drive, spirit, opinions, design, creativity, innovation, development, … it’s never about standstill. That’s also the reason why a basic scale model can’t work. Once a scale is in balance, it is standing still. That’s simply not the balance we are talking about here. But the spinning top crashes without movement. That sounds about right.
Conclusion:
To me this balance point it is a place of harmony, a place where everything is in flow, a place where there is no good or bad, no yes or no, no black or white and especially no grey zone. Everything is just exactly right as it is, and it is moving forward in the most beautiful and positive way possible. It’s something hard to achieve as here in our world we live with contrasts every day and they have a meaning to exist. Thanks to contrasts we know how colorful life is and we can learn to appreciate it. Finally, we have the free will to decide on which side we want to stand. I truly believe that it’s our job here on earth to strive for the balance point, live it as much as we can, build our character, lead by example and thus inspire others to do so as well.
So take this with you…if it is a hard day with your beloved ones, maybe your relationship is simply out of balance. If you can’t close the deal, you’re simply not aligned with your potential client. If your bank account is out of balance, you’ve potentially spent too much on things that you actually don’t need. But don’t stress out. Now you know how to fix it and how to push it back into the right direction. Give your spinning top a new spin.
P.S. I look forward to your thoughts and comments!
Tim Röhrich writes about personal development, enabling technologies, and purposeful projects. He works in innovation, forms communities, studied engineering & management, founded three companies, and is a partner in one of the most ambitious companies in Europe, pioneers.io.
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