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Finding Balance in Life


There is an insightful comment from the novelist Virginia Woolf in her search for purpose in life. She had often come to detours and dead ends. There were high moments of discovery and low times of nagging self-doubt. In a personal essay she concluded, “What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with the years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”

It is such a magnificent comment.

Most of us at some point in our lives, often in mid-life or our later years, look back over it all and wonder what any of it meant. We see people we loved for the wrong reasons. Relationships that ended badly. Pathways we should have never taken. Choices we knew were questionable but made them anyway often with regret.

We see good times, laughter and celebrations, deep love; that fun concert, the hilarious bachelor or bachelorette party, the touching wedding, the birth of a child, a career achievement, helping a stranger, weeping at funerals, not in sorrow but simply remembering significant times with someone close and dear to us.

Life is a balance of all of this. We become mature, responsible people when we learn to move into the flow of this mixture of experiences; when we finally find a balance from them.

My son Caleb called me last week to tell me that one of their neighborhood children, my grandson Austin’s best little friend, was hit by a car while riding his bicycle. He was killed instantly. Eight years old. A beautiful, happy boy.

The neighborhood was engulfed in sorrow. Austin and my granddaughter Avery were stunned by the loss of their little friend. Caleb and Kameron were in shock. The child’s parents lost in that undertow of grief where one seems to be slowly drowning in heartbreak and agony.

Life comes into clear focus in these moments, and, removed from all the distractions that confine us, we see the mystery, the complexity, the incomprehensibleness of it all. And finally, we think of what truly matters to us.

Death, tragedy, debilitating illness, loss, are inextricably woven into the fabric of our lives. We cannot escape them. As are enormous joys, new discoveries, ecstatic celebrations, transforming affections, and profound love.

It is in accepting this that we find some sense of balance. No one lives very far into life without experiencing some, if not all, of these beautiful and deeply conflicting things.

There is something writer and essayist, Rebecca Solnit, has written that reflects all of this. It is a long quote, but stay with it. It is so relevant:

“The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason but the blue at the horizon, the blue of the land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy, blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance; the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.”

There is something amazingly comforting about this for me. 

Solnit’s description of the color blue is a beautiful metaphor of this balance in life I’m talking about. How a mixture of deep and shallow, of light and distance, all work together to give us a majestic color. And the light that gets lost? Wow. That is the mystery we all have to embrace. Because in doing so, we arrive at a sense of balance that finally gives meaning to life; that ultimately brings all the elements together to give it breathtaking color.

© 2019 Timothy Moody

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