Life feels good when things are in balance.
When balance prevails, the stars feel as though they’re aligned and working in our favour. Our efforts deliver results easily, naturally. Circumstances seem to conspire with us like a tail-wind, encouraging progress, supercharging the work we put in.
Balance feels comfortable and harmonious.
It feels safe, stable and reliable.
It’s a place of order and equilibrium.
But sooner or later things fall out of balance — they always do.
Comfort leads to complacency.
Stability turns into stagnation.
Reliable becomes repetitive and boring.
It’s entirely necessary to upset the balance voluntarily now and again, before life decides to disrupt it for us — which it will if we leave things as they are for long enough.
To bring about change and improvement it’s essential to rock the boat, to abandon the status quo and push outside of the comfort zone.
It seems to me that we need to upset the balance of life if we’re to achieve lasting results and enduring progress.
Get uncomfortable
Pushing forward with personal growth and improvement always feels uncomfortable to begin with. Our risk-averse brain tries to discourage us from stepping beyond the safety and familiarity of our comfort zone. Our subconscious tries to pull us back to the place of balance and equilibrium.
The forces of physics and nature are constantly trying to restore balance and order, where equal and opposite forces apply in harmony.
In seeking to change ourselves and to grow and achieve bigger and better things, we’re disrupting the equation. We’re forcing the balance to shift. It feels uncomfortable because we’re fighting against the laws of science and nature as well as our innate desire to stick with what’s safe, easy and comfortable.
To push forwards and become better examples of ourselves we need to overcome the inertia and to invoke forces of change.
If we’re persistent and consistent in our actions, a new point of comfortable balance will be reached sooner or later, as our efforts are rewarded and we achieve our goals.
Getting what we want is one thing, but now we’ve got to fight to maintain our new point of balance. That comes by putting in corresponding amounts of work to keep what we’ve earned.
Work to get it, work to keep it
A new relationship that started out being spontaneous, passionate and exciting will likely stagnate if we neglect to make ongoing gestures of kindness, to act with affection, care and consideration just as we used to during courtship.
A once-thriving business will lose money if it stops innovating, ignores competitors or neglects to measure and meet the needs of its customers
Toned muscles waste away and physical endurance diminishes if we don’t push ourselves at the gym and watch what we eat for the long term.
Reaching the goal and achieving a new state of balance isn’t the end of the journey. We worked to get it and now we’ve got to work work to keep it. Balance doesn’t just happen — it needs to be maintained.
If we allow ourselves to become complacent about our achievements, if we allow standards to slip then we’ll lose balance again.
It’s not enough to work to achieve your goals and attain balance in your new life; you’ve got to put in the work to remain at that level.
Avoid complacency
To appreciate times of leisure and relaxation we need to regularly experience periods of work and effort.
A place of balance isn’t always a good place, and we can all too easily settle into a situation that isn’t inherently ‘good’ for us just because it’s easy and comfortable. When we become used to a lifestyle of lethargy and apathy, when we narrow our worldview and limit ourselves to living life on a small scale, then a balance of sorts is achieved. But it’s not a happy balance.
Our expectations of life and of ourselves are lowered. We demand less of ourselves and become resigned to merely existing and meeting a standard of the bare minimum. That is also a place where balance exists, but not a happy balance.
To get more from life, to stretch ourselves and to grow demands committed and repeated efforts which feel uncomfortable.
It’s unsettling, but it’s a necessary discomfort. Soon enough a new position of balance will be attained if we’re committed to action and willing to put in the efforts to make the change happen, and then to make it stick.
In this way the balance of life is restored once more.
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This post was previously published on ILLUMINATION.
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