Yin and Yang

Balance is important in everything you do. There’s that old saying that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. It’s definitely true.

Try to think of some action, thought or feeling that doesn’t have an opposite. Forward/backward, happy/sad, good/bad, there’s balance implied in all those couplings. It’s an integral part of living that all too often gets ignored. And lately, I’m having no end of trouble with this.

Luckily, I have a little dog named Maddie who needs to be walked several times a day. No matter how wrapped up in writing I might become, she pulls me out of it and into the real world eventually.

I’ll be sitting at the computer, typing away and there she is bumping me with her nose, clapping her jaws at me, and eventually (if I ignore her for too long) uttering a soft little growl. I laugh, get up, get the leash and out the door we go.

Bonfire, our cat, would like to go with us. He loves the outdoors as much as Maddie does, but walking a dog and a cat at the same time doesn’t work out all that well. I’ve tried it. Disastrous might be a better way to put it. I do take Bonfire out with harness and leash occasionally, but for the most part he gets his dose of outdoors on our deck inside of a pop-up style sport tent. The kind designed to allow you to sit outside and not be eaten alive by mosquitoes.

I think that we ignore balance at our own peril. Doing too much of one thing is never good. We get stale. It is tiring. There is no latitude for “recharging the batteries.” I believe that it has the capacity to make us physically ill as well.

Finding balance in this day and age can be difficult. We are all under so much pressure to succeed, to make money, to keep up, that we lose our focus on the elemental things that are so important in our lives. Like just slowing down and looking at a tree now and then. Really looking at it. Seeing all its parts. Watching the branches sway in the wind.

I’ve no magic answer for how to find balance in your life. Some days I feel totally off kilter. Luckily, I have a plucky little mutt to straighten me out. And an inscrutable cat to remind me that I don’t know everything.