I’ve always held that life relies on a delicate balance. Between work and play, altruism and egoism, caring and prying. Between caring too much and not caring, giving in to superficiality and looking slovenly, pursuing perfection and settling for good enough.
In fact, I used to write that exact sentence — “life relies on a delicate balance” — in my English essays in high school because I, for some reason, thought it made me seem all profound if I could connect everything to life and remaining in the perfect center of the seesaws and situations life presents us. In actuality, balance is such a cliché. But then again, most clichés are true. Wait, but isn’t it a cliché that most clichés are true? Apparently Steven Fry said, “It is a cliché that most clichés are true, but then, like most clichés, that cliché is untrue.” Am I just one big cliché? Is anything I just wrote true?
Cliché status and the truth in clichés aside, I still believe that balance is good and that we should actively try to achieve it. Take the classic s-triangle that all college students deal with. School, sleep, and social life make up the three angles. The goal is to make sure your triangle doesn’t come out too lopsided. Now, a lot of people will say that you can only pick two of the s’s. I think you can have all three, but there’s another equation that comes into play: balancing between actually caring about the s-triangle and wasting time on things like Facebook. Most people pick the latter some of the time when they really want the former, and that just throws everything off.
Balance. It’s important. But this guy begs to differ. He thinks that we live in constant leaning and achieve balance only in retrospect. Am I right, or is he, or are we both?
Well, what is balance, anyway? It doesn’t mean that you have pick exactly equal amounts of anything. That’s not possible. First of all, how do we measure those amounts? In hours? Does anyone actually keep track of the exact hours they spend on work and play, or school, sleep, and socializing? I don’t think so. What about the balance between things like altruism and egoism? Is it possible to count how many hours you spend being selfless and how many you spend being self-loving? No. And obviously if you can’t measure the two sides of a balance, you can’t make them even. If that’s what Carlos means, then he’s right; we’re always leaning, and the only reason hindsight equalizes everything is because leans blur together and cancel out other leans.
I think that balance is subjective, that we all have our own scales. You might have a gold one, I might have a silver one, and that person you don’t like might have a rusty one or one that’s covered in tacky rhinestones. We all just have to pick the amounts of life aspects that balance out our own scales. If you’re a student, it means sketching the s-triangle that you think looks best, not drawing a perfectly equilateral one. Or it might mean drawing a triangle that’s equilateral only when you put on the goggles that your unique life has given you.
And if you look at your balance or your triangle and it’s not the way you want it to be, then you’re doing yourself an injustice. You either need to adjust your expectations, or you need to try harder at achieving balance. When your expectations are too high, disappointment takes over. When you don’t try hard enough, mediocrity wins.