Balance

Achieving balance is significant to the healing process.  Balance is additionally necessary to resolving any personal or professional dilemma.  Anger, pity parties, finding excuses, rationalization, commiserating with fellow sufferers, and blaming someone else, all, impede the acquisition of balance.  Practically speaking, balance is the ability to find the assets and liabilities of any given situation.  An over emphasis on either side distorts our analysis and prevents us from learning and growing from our experience.  Yet, a balanced evaluation enables us to find helpful lessons as we journey forward and to discard the harmful circumstances.

When others mistreat us, we have an immediate tendency to thirst for revenge.  We want to even the score.  We want them to feel the same pain that we experience.  We justify these emotions with “righteous indignation.”  Our victimizers are evil people who should experience the wrath of God and the greatest punishment that the law allows because they have harmed us.  Embedded in those notions is an assumption that we are righteous and have never been victimizers.  “The rain falls on the just and the unjust a like.”  In addition, anger leads to resentment.  We harbor our own evil desires for the misfortune of others.  Left unresolved, this resentment festers into hatred, which is a cancer of the mind, heart, and soul.  This deadly combination of anger, vengeance, resentment and possibly hatred prevents us from scrutinizing a situation such that we can learn from it.

If we are willing to tone down our emotions, we can take a balanced approach to resolving any challenge.  Were our “victimizers” correct in any of their statements and assessments?  Interestingly, we must ask whether we can learn anything from them.  Casting aspersion upon them and assassinating their characters merely makes us just like them.  Having had this difficult and hurtful experience, are there any new skills that we achieved?  Are we a better judge of people’s character?  Are we more discerning of human behavior?  Do we now know whom to trust?  The refusal to assess our experiences for their benefits and shortcomings inhibits any possibility that we can heal and grow from them.

Should we find ourselves in the midst of a major health challenge, we may fall prey easily to the temptation to engage in endless pity parties.  Poor me!  Why me?  God, how could you allow this to happen?  After all the good that I have done in the world, how could this happen to me?  Incessantly asking such questions prevents us from looking at our dilemma with a balanced perspective.  What role, if any, did we play in bringing about this health crisis?  Did we throw caution and discipline to wind as it relates to diet, exercise, and preventive healthcare?  If we were to change these habits, would they help in the healing process?  What are the residual benefits to increasing the depth of our spirituality?  Can we cultivate the discipline to follow the doctor’s orders and partner with him or her in the healing process?  These questions among several others can assist us in taking an inventory of the pluses and minuses of our predicament.  With such a balanced analysis, we can proceed to strengthening our assets and neutralizing our liabilities.

Practicing good financial stewardship is another area that requires balance.  The quest to eliminate debt may lead us to inadvertently overpay our bills.  Thereby, we fail to leave ourselves enough cash flow until our next pay period.  Moreover, financial balance requires that we clearly differentiate between “needs” and “wants.”  It also necessitates the cultivation of delayed gratification.  We must learn to wait.  Lusting after material acquisition digs deeper pits of debt and high interest rates.  Imagine practicing the balance of desiring a big ticket item, researching what the market allows as the best price for that item; saving the necessary amount while allowing for inflation; purchasing the item with cash and enjoying the item without revolving debt and high interest rates.  In its simplest form, good financial stewardship seeks a balanced scale of credits and debits.  Finding the discipline, self-control and willingness to achieve that balance leads to the joy of the previous example.

Without balance, we can never gain a realistic and holistic outlook on anything.  “Anger turns off the light in the mind.”  Accordingly, wallowing in “righteous indignation” immediately produces blind spots in our analysis.  Throwing pity parties is an elaborate form of egocentricity.  Blaming others is a fallacious attempt to absolve ourselves of any responsibility in the matter.  In contrast, if we are willing to examine any experience with a detailed and determined approach to find the positive and negative, then we can learn and grow from it.  Furthermore, we must be willing to acknowledge straightforwardly the role we played rather than excessively dwelling on the “unjust” actions of others.  Summarily, balance enables us to transform any hurtful situation into an asset for daily living.