If what we seek is freedom to be, the only limitation is balance. Freedom is a continuum, the higher up the scale you go, the more delicate the balance required. Interestingly, the balance you require might be free of self – an added load, a stick, a pole, a string, a cover, a shield, hollow bones, favorable weather and maybe, wings. A good balance is humility.
Humility is borne out of Sonder.
“Sonder (n.) – the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own – populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness – an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.”- John Koenig (The dictionary of obscure sorrows).
We are different and similar. We are perfect and incomplete. We are special and replaceable. Humility is not borne out of being less of self, it is being truly comfortable with self, understanding the levers that influence self and consciously maneuvering those levers to remain present.
Balance is needed for the journey, it is not an end. If you seek just balance, change will scare you. Change is the refresh button of life and life presses refresh often.
If change scares you, life will habitually scare you.
If balance is the end you seek, you might stay alive but live unlively.
If freedom is the end you seek, cultivate balance.
– Osasu Oviawe
