Sergei Polunin Dancing to “Take Me To Church”
Somewhere along the way our notion of balance becomes about stillness. That balance is about perfect measures bringing everything to a point where nothing moves. It’s the essence of perfection, to be perfectly balanced in a stillness that proves everything is exactly equal, measured, compared, in exacting relationship to each other. Yet nothing could be more extreme or more sterile. It halts living things like trapping them in amber. It is an unachievable goal which makes everything else less than by comparison and keeps us forever striving in futility.
Balance, instead, should be seen like happiness. Neither is a state of being we experience often in the moment, but they are summations of our lives over time. We can look back at the end of a phase and see that we were happy or balanced over all. So rather than seek balance, instead we should engage in balancing. We should see balance as an activity, an active verb. Like dancers and martial artists discover early on, the most balanced place is in movement. Shifting and flowing back and forth around our center creates a momentum, creates energy. We know this instinctively hence we soothe ourselves and others through rocking…back and forth…balancing ourselves and each other through the centering movements…
Life is not meant to be stagnant, to be still. We speak of stillness as a goal, but what we mean is outer stillness so that we can engage our inner world or inner stillness so we can engage fully with the outer world. This is balancing, the movement back and forth between the inner and the outer…rocking…rocking. True stillness is detrimental to our health. It causes damage to our bodies, is destructive to our minds. In life we become out of balance when we stop moving. When we become stuck or overly attached to something or someone this causes us to be unable to move, to reach out for the other things we need, to experience our full range of motion. To achieve balance we don’t need to move to another still point, but instead to set things in motion once again. It is in our nature to be balancing, to move to the rhythms of life, of our soul, of the world around us.
