Balance

Balance is a virtue that I’ve become more and more a fan of as I get older. It may only be that age tempers passions and extremes are just too much work to maintain, but I’d still put my money on balance being all in a good ideal to strive for.

Of course balancing the scales doesn’t always just mean some kind of 50/50 arrangement. Sometimes it only takes a little salt to balance a dish, only a little harshness to balance praise, or a little kindness to balance a lot of suffering. I find the far extremes almost always warn you in small ways of the dangers of too much. You can feel the wrongness, the time for a shift.

I think someone recently condemned the mushy middle of politics. Personally I rather like the mushy middle of many things though by no means does that equate to sameness. I like my rough edges and paradoxes and orchestrating them into something of a harmony of meaning, at least for a time. In the middle you can go in any direction you need to, it’s a great place to start things.

Of course its not for everyone, and in my balancing way I’m glad there are folks living extremes, pushing the limits and going for broke. Often with folks like that going in all directions it helps me see the middle ground, places I’d not known of in the intellectual landscape. When radicals go to far they can often be used to counteract one another and in the aftermath create something that takes the wisdom from both.