On Tilting

You know how it is.

Some days, home life is the most important. So we de-weight the rest of our life and take care of cooking, cleaning, sick kids. Other days, work takes on a higher priority and on such days, laundry piles up, the house remains cluttered, the family eats  frozen mac and cheese and you shudder at the thought of visitors.

Some days, its  your personal landscape, physical, mental, emotional – that takes the priority . You get out of work early and go to that yoga class or that nice long hike, or a soul-opening, mind-bending  talk with a friend.

And then there are other days when everything seems just right, just so perfectly balanced that while utterly grateful for  such balance, you marvel at the rightness of it, and its elusive quality.

Everybody wants this narrow idea of perfect balance. Everybody tries for a ‘balanced life’, works on their ‘balancing act’. But everyone is dismayed that this balance is so elusive, that we just see glimpses of it. And beat ourselves up that we have lost our balance.

And forget that ’tilting’ as Brooke McAlary says, is far more attainable and in my case, satisfying. And sometimes, even profound.

One thing tilting does is to remind us our humanness – we cannot all be exceptional in everything we do and do everything exceptionally al the same time. However we can do one thing exceptionally at any given time!

The other thing tilting teaches us is the long view. As we grow and thrive, we look back and realize that through tilting we have satisfied most of our obligations and duties and needs and goals, with less stress, more joyfully.

And so let us all tilt together and be free of striving for this perfect balance all the time. Let us tilt – crazily sometimes, like a motorcycle taking fast corners , and sometimes steadily like that unicyclist going uphill. And sometimes achieving that state of perfect grace and balance.