A Short Meditation on Balance and Fear

A Vagabond Voices writing (and living) prompt

Of late, it has been hard for me to find a balance.

There are my responsibilities as a father, being a sort of perpetual student, my desire to dedicate more time to write, spend time outdoors riding bicycles or running. Too many forces applied to my persona!

There are so many competing interests and forces affecting our balance.

What determines the ability of an object to balance itself in existence?

There are always forces to be applied against a counterforce to create balance. And we find our balance in the harmony of the tension created by those forces. How many of these pressures can we tolerate to act upon us?

The problem is not that a person may not be affected by multiple forces at once. But once we place too many vectors into the equation, it is hard to say the intensity in which an object or a person will move.

At times, multiple vectors applied in opposite directions result in the object not moving.

Fear may be the largest force affecting our ability to move in the direction our soul intends. Acting as the friction exerted over the vehicle’s tire on the road.

Fortunately, we are not objects in a physics book that have no saying on what to do with the different forces that affect them.

To apply more energy to a vector may also help us to move, but we will probably still have to contend with the limiting counterforces that pull us in different directions.

Choosing to eliminate a particular force may allow us to use the opposing vector and move. To let go.

Letting go, seems in principle, the simplest solution.

Letting go of our fear.

Battling through insecurities and fears is energy-consuming. We spend time trying to decide if to act or not. Usually, we know the path to take. Or at least the one we want to take. In making a decision, we let go of our fear.

Often we’d like to point at one cardinal moment towards which we can point and say, here is where I found my balance.

But to maintain our balance is a constant act of micro-adjustments and concessions. To add intensity to the forces that are important to us, letting go of drag while understanding that depending on which destination we want to reach, we will have to contend with environmental forces that are beyond our control.

But even as forces are affecting us and many of them we have no control over, we do have control over how to afront the challenges awaiting us.

To let go of our fear is not to jump into risk-seeking behavior for the sake of challenging fate.

It is to be willing to be carried by the waters of life so we can continue flowing through it, avoiding stagnation.

©Pablo Pereyra 2020. Thank you for reading.