Balance Is a Pendulum
Don't fight the swing.
When considering the word “balance,” what usually comes to mind is the static stillness of a mechanical scale:
This is a fairly precarious image. Like a tightrope walker, the system comes crashing down with the slightest error. It’s unforgivable. It presupposes that life’s natural and desired state is stillness and that instability is a deviation from the norm.
Philosophy and religion have long taught the wisdom of accepting change in the outside world. Tomorrow you may win the lottery, fall in love, be the victim of a horrible crime, discover a friend’s terminal illness, or die. I think it is equally important to accept the day-to-day changes within ourselves.
So what if balance isn’t a fulcrum, but a pendulum, swinging between two states of mind? What if oscillations are a natural part of a dynamic life, and our refusal to acknowledge them is the source of suffering?
Structure vs. serendipity
It’s been frustrating to grapple with my own evolving motivations as I explore my next steps. When I quit my job, I remember feeling so strongly that I was ready to found a startup immediately. I put together a group of my friends to go to San Francisco for YC’s Startup School, spent an incredible week with them, but immediately returned home to sink into a quagmire of my fears and inhibitions.
I felt directionless. I stopped driving forward towards immediately building something; I wasn’t sure I could. My job search stalled out before it began. I felt depressed and anxious and retreated from my friends.
What forced these feelings to spiral was that I was beating myself up for feeling them. It felt like I had pulled the rug out from under myself. If I couldn’t trust my own inner self to be consistent, what could I rely on?
I felt a lot better when I started to see that my motivations hadn’t just shifted at random: my needs had changed. Before I quit, every cell in my body cried out for change; I couldn’t keep cashing a check and wait for another job to fall into my lap. The great pendulum in my heart of “structure vs. serendipity” had begun its roaring swing toward the latter and was at peak velocity. So I chose to honor it, trusted myself, and stepped into the unknown.
In the weeks following, that pendulum began its natural swing back toward “structure.” I had just made an incredibly hard decision to leave my job. It took me some time to realize, but I wasn’t ready to follow that up with a new commitment to a nebulous startup idea.
Restless to gain mastery of a skill, I started applying to 16-week immersive software engineering bootcamps. This wasn’t the most intuitive next step - most people do bootcamps to break into tech, but I’m already in the field. But the process of applying has set a direction, lifted pressure off of my job search, and relieved the guilt from the time I spend tinkering. “If all else fails, I’ll just go back to school for a few months,” says the voice in my head. I’ve been able to start this blog, finish my personal website, and even code my first video game - all lifelong goals of mine.
Whether or not I end up attending a bootcamp, honoring the swing of the pendulum toward structure has brought more creativity and authenticity into my life. And so begins my journey back toward newness.
Self vs. others
Another pendulum I’ve noticed swings on the axis of “self vs. others,” between solitude and company. I considered that my post-SF retreat from others wasn’t necessarily pathological. Maybe I just needed the space to reflect after such an extroverted experience.
I virtually eliminated my usual blistering cadence of coffee chats and happy hours and turned down a once-in-a-decade trip with a dear friend to a spiritualist sanctuary in Lily Dale. I spent hours on Edgewater Beach reflecting on passages from Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, like this one:
Self-mastery and self-discipline are the foundation of good relationships with others. Some people say that you have to like yourself before you can like others. I think that idea has merit, but if you don’t know yourself, if you don’t control yourself, if you don’t have mastery over yourself, it’s very hard to like yourself, except in some short-term, psych-up, superficial way. Real self-respect comes from dominion over self, from true independence.
The line between unhealthy co-dependence and generative interdependence is deep personal confidence and trust. We must first care for ourselves. Then we must care deeply for others. This is the wisdom of the pendulum.
Of course, the pendulum inherits its periodic truth from the truest pattern governing our lives: cycles, circles, seasons, and loops.
Parker J. Palmer provides the strongest case for choosing this metaphor in the most beautiful prose I’ve ever read:
Most of us have a metaphor, conscious or not, that names our experience of life. Animated by the imagination, one of the most vital powers we possess, our metaphors are more than mirrors to reality – they often become reality, transmuting themselves from language into the living of our lives.
I know people who say, “Life is like a game of chance – some win, some lose.” But that metaphor can create a fatalism about losing or an obsession with beating the odds. I know other people who say, “Life is like a battlefield – you get the enemy, or the enemy gets you.” But that metaphor can result in enemies around every corner and a constant sense of siege. We do well to choose our metaphors wisely.“Seasons” is a wise metaphor for the movement of life, I think. It suggests that life is neither a battlefield nor a game of chance but something infinitely richer, more promising, more real. The notion that our lives are like the eternal cycle of the seasons does not deny the struggle or the joy, the loss or the gain, the darkness or the light, but encourages us to embrace it all – and to find in all of it opportunities for growth.
Khalil Gibran agrees, in the most beautiful poetry I’ve ever read:
And a woman spoke, saying, Tell us of Pain. And he said: Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain. And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy; And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields. And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief. Much of your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility: For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen, And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.
It is gentler to accept change, and wiser to welcome it. Honor winter, and trust that summer will return. The pendulum will swing the other way.
Other pendulum axes I’ve identified:
Seeking travel vs. staying home
Seeking old friends vs. seeking new friends
Researching theory vs. building applications
Seeking time alone vs. seeking time with a partner
Seeking intimacy vs. seeking distance
Seeking new data input vs. synthesizing existing data
What pendulums and cycles can you identify within yourself?
Hooked from the first sentence and thought provoking all the way through. You have done justice to your child-self, who so desperately wanted to create but had nothing new to say yet. You’ve taken beautiful passages and ideas from inspired people and woven them together with your own ideas to create something moving and alive, something greater than the sum of its parts.
A few of my pendulums:
1. Creation vs. Consumption - I seek out inspiring YouTube videos, well-designed games, transformational movies, and other experiences that expand the boundaries of my mind. Eventually I begin to feel restless, with thoughts like “why couldn’t I make this” or “I crave the feeling of inspiring others with something that I myself have created”, and I spring into creation mode, drawing from the inspirations I’ve collected over the days, weeks, or months to create something new and true to me.
2. Learning vs. Teaching, or Sponge vs. Fountain - I’ve noticed this primarily with poetry and speakers like Alan Watts and Jordan Peterson, but also recently at work. Whenever I start to experience periods of intermittent conflicting thoughts, I look for places to learn new things to spark new insights, like becoming a sponge soaking up as much water as it can. With poetry, finding pieces that so perfectly capture an emotion, behavior, thought pattern, etc., swings the pendulum to the teaching or “fountain” side where I feel compelled to encourage others to “feel the same thing I just felt”. At work, there is a pendulum that swings between soaking up as much information about a new industry and learning as much as possible from my experienced superiors, and becoming a manager, a delegator, someone to turn to who has the experience and problem solving to meaningfully help other people. Ahh the joys of being at a startup. For the first 5 months, I was in full sponge mode. However, over that time, the size of the company has more than doubled, and I’ve suddenly become one of the more “senior” employees in a sense. I’ve felt the sponge vs. fountain pendulum slowly starting to swing, and it’s only been the last 2 weeks that I believe I’ve swung to the other side, becoming a fountain of the information I’ve soaked up in the last 5 months, confident in managing and delegating, and more extroverted than I’ve ever felt before.
3. Travel vs. Home, Old Friends vs. New Friends, Partner vs. Alone, Intimacy vs. Distance, and New Data vs. Synthesizing all hit home for me.
Critique: I like the ideas behind self vs. others, but the pendulum analogy was not as strong for me as the others. Maybe this is because swinging from structure to serendipity implies that you will be willingly leaving structure behind temporarily as you swap between binary states, whereas swinging from self to others could be misinterpreted as “leaving yourself behind” as you pursue caring for others, eliminating the unidirectional interdependence that I think gives power to the self vs. others concept, yet is difficult to capture in the language of the pendulum.
Perhaps some kind of “ground-up” analogy would be interesting to explore, where certain “foundations” (self-care in this case) are prerequisites for higher-order needs or structures (caring for others).
"Honor winter and trust that summer will return" !!!
The prevalence of dualities in the human existence has always amazed me. I appreciate your thoughts 🤞