To Live is to Change
Spring equinox thoughts on finding balance.
According to folklore you can only balance an egg in an upright position on the spring equinox when the earth’s axis is tilted neither toward nor away from the sun.
It’s nonsense, of course, but I like the idea of trying - and failing - to balance an egg in that way. It reminds me of my own attempts to find balance in my life. I convince myself that if I try hard enough and wait for the right conditions long enough I will achieve a state of balance that will hold me in place and allow me to rest from all my wobbliness. Like the attempt to balance an egg on its end, my attempts at finding balance begin with excitement and optimism but usually end in disappointment.
Although the equinox doesn’t miraculously help eggs to stand upright on their ends, it is a time that invites us to ponder balance. Today, as I follow that invitation, I remember something I was told during a class I took with Lucy Abbott Tucker, co-founder of Spiritual Directors International and as close to an archetypal Wise Woman as I have met.
“I used to think of balance like this,” she said holding her arms out to her sides with palms facing upwards, “But now I think of balance like this,” she continued and began to move her arms up and down in a motion reminiscent of a set of scales.
I understood her to be telling us that balance is not about achieving a fixed, immovable state but about movement, flow, and non-resistance to change.
I’m convinced Lucy is right but I’ve struggled to accept her wisdom. I think that’s mainly because I want to resist the idea of balance having anything to do with embracing change. I want to believe that there’s a changeless set of conditions or perfect pattern of daily living that I could - with effort and patience - achieve one day in some distant future. I picture myself arriving there as though I’ve arrived home from a long hike and am finally able to take off my boots and rest. I imagine life on the other side of that achievement as stable and consistent, free from the burden of endless adjustments.
I’m still working on releasing the fantasy that balance is a changeless state I could once and for all achieve but fantasy it is and release it I must. The deeper knowing in me reminds me that change is life and resistance to change is ultimately resistance to life. “Here below to live is to change,” writes John Henry Newman “and to be perfect is to have changed often.”1 If I want to find balance - and a more “perfect”, restful way of being - I need to work with and not against the natural ebb and flow of life.
By the time you read this the equinox will already have passed. You didn’t miss the date - it’s today - but the actual moment where the earth is “balanced” so that it is tilted neither toward nor away from the sun took place at 9.01am GMT. Although the significance of that moment will be celebrated all day as bringing spring to the Northern Hemisphere and autumn to the Southern Hemisphere, the equinox is but a moment in the earth’s annual journey around the sun. Thankfully that ever spinning, ever tilting journey never stops. If it did, the results would be catastrophic and ultimately lead to the planet becoming uninhabitable (read this space.com article if you want to know exactly what would happen). It amuses me to think that even on the day when we’re encouraged to think of balance as a state of holding still, nature is reminding us that stability looks much more like motion.
All of this makes me wonder what balance could look like in my life - and in yours - if we let go of the understandable, but ultimately unhelpful, tendency we have to imagine balance as a still and changeless state that we would achieve if we could only figure out, once and for all, what it required us to fix in ourselves or our lives.
It makes me wonder what it would look like to embrace balance as movement and flow.
It makes me wonder how we might seek balance in a way that honours and doesn’t resist change.
I don’t know that I have an answer exactly but I think it might have something to do with noticing where change is already wanting to happen and then answering that call. What that means for you will depend on what is happening in your life but it could, for example, look like noticing where effort is turning to exhaustion and responding by leaning into the rest that already wants to happen. Or, conversely, noticing where rest or routine is turning to boredom and inertia and allowing that to move you into action. In the past I’ve treated these signs of needing to adjust my behaviours as signs of imbalance but if balance is found through movement and not static inertia, these times of shifting are the exact signs that balance is happening. Shifts and changes are not the enemy of balance, they are its conditions. Balance isn’t something I achieve, it’s something I allow to flow.
And so, on this spring equinox day, I invite you to ponder with me:
What is wanting to flow in your life?
What is passing and what is arriving?
Where is Life through life bringing balance through change?
What would it be like to welcome that change?
John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 6th ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989, 2015), p40.