In Need Of Balance
[Image 1]
Preface
Balance is such a subjective word. One person’s balance is another person’s chaos.
In this conformist driven world, it’s easy to find oneself knocked off kilter and spinning in a clunky, wobbly orbit pushed and pulled by the mob’s negative and pungent gravity.
In today’s post, I want to offer escape from the mass push and pull of continually changing and disturbing shifts of morality the hoarding swell of masses obnoxiously insist all participate in.
Instead of being tossed to and fro, like a boat on a stormy ocean, one can learn to use one’s innate sense of balance—one’s unique identity—as an anchor point to fix one’s inner and outer vessel to something solid and immovable, avoiding the toppling over those who are floating without a sovereign mooring so often experience.
One’s sense of balance is a unique and sensual orbit circling personal values, purpose, and intention, and simply should not include the shifty and insecure movement of the fray.
Balance is an authentic motion, an individual harmonic resonance, and a sense of value and rootedness in an ever-changing world.
The Secret of the golden Triangle
Years ago, I discovered the beauty of the Golden Mean, a mathematical equation that describes the geometric relationships in the universe. This equation, among other things, has taught me how to apply nature’s balance to my life in a practical sense.
The Golden Mean is a division of shapes found in the natural world that creates a myriad of sensorial effects, from the oddities of the cochlea within the inner ear, to the spiral of flora, and the pleasing sensation of art divided into the proper thirds.
It is a model and a benchmark, a pleasing rule to follow and a desirable understanding to attain. [Image A]
[Image 2]
Within the metaphor of the Golden Mean lies a beautiful secret, a triangular format for finding balance in one’s life through an understanding of the triadic relationship found within one’s own nature.
Unbeknownst to most, one’s character and identity can be divided into thirds. Because we are a part of nature, our resonance mirrors nature. Like the rule of thirds in art, one’s personality shares a similar division.
One’s core essence is similar to that of a triangle, what I call the Golden Triangle, because of its interesting correlation to the Golden Mean, the mean representing the proper or most pleasing middle found between two points, or extremes.
You may notice that the harmonious middle is not centralized and symmetric in the image above. In fact, one might find it imbalanced or lopsided when looking at it straight on.
However, as many before me have noted, the beauty is found in the asymmetry, in the motion, and in the effective lopsidedness, if there really is such a thing, caused by the lack of a true middle. It is not perfectly balanced, at least not in a stringent kindergarten sense.
Instead, the Golden Mean finds a happy place in a kind of unfair leaning to one side or the other, the proposition of which opens a much needed discussion on beauty, fairness, and the asymmetrical pairings found in nature, like man and woman, mountain and valley, mercy and justice, and so forth.
The reason I find the imbalance so intriguing, especially with regards to identity and character, is the discovery that my own nature is hopelessly or happily, as the case may be, imbalanced.
For example, as I mentioned previously, human nature, at least when looking at specifics, like individual identity, takes on a similar lopsided tendency as the Golden Mean does in nature. [Image B]
[Image 3]
One’s core nature, appearance, and behavior is not perfectly balanced, and for good reason.
People are mostly dissimilar from one another, despite desperate attempts to correct nature’s order through a self-loathing emulation of others brought on by comparison and the need for social acceptance.
However, when one begins to understand the beauty of difference and the perfection of imbalance as a means of balance, one loses the desire to emulate another, and instead desires to fully work with and resonate within one’s own purposely imperfect balanced orbit.
The Division of Thirds Within One’s Identity
One’s character or core nature can be divided into three distinct and separate columns or archetypes. [Image C]
[Image 4]
Where we often think of a person as a singular entity, within that singularity are a multitude of patterns, values, attributes, abilities, and intentions. This multitude within a singularity, like stars and planets within a universal structure, can be broken down into a pattern of three.
Instead of three columns, I prefer a triangular structure.
[Image 5]
Each column or point on the triangle represents a specific pattern of thought, behavior, and belief, found within one’s identity, they are what I call, Identity Pillars.
These pillars hold the ingredients or archteypal differences within one’s identity that provide a kind of structural integrity or balance, helping one to stay rooted in one’s distinct and individual purpose.
Originally, when I discovered my own identity pillars they looked something like this [see Image E].
[Image 6]
In this illustration, each point of the triangle represent a distinct and different part of my personality. Originally, I saw each point as being equal, like each part of my personality were equally measured.
As time has passed, I’ve been able to refine my understanding of this Golden Triangle of identity to include Mean-type balance or lopsidedness.
Now, it looks more like this, [see Image F].
[Image 7]
The circle represents the wholeness of a single individual’s personality, and the triangle represents the golden imbalance of attributes and traits that creates the harmony within.
The difference from the original, although slight, is incredibly important as it illustrates my personal understanding about how the characteristics of my identity are divided up unevenly.
There are still three, yes, but they are not equally distributed within my personality.
Balancing Archetypal Distinctions
Representing my identity’s pillars using size and archetypal distinctions has helped me to find balance and to work with the different aspects of my personality more effectively.
I am not equally curator, sovereign, and oracle. My curator aspect outweighs both the oracle and the sovereign aspects of my personality, making my core nature lopsided and imbalanced.
My oracle aspect creates a sort of harmony between the other two, and is therefore, smaller than the largest and larger than the smallest. It acts as a sort of mediator and rectifier, keeping my differences harmonic.
The sovereign aspect is the most intense aspect and is also the smallest. This has been an important distinction for my understanding of self. It has helped me to recognize when I am acting in a discordant way. The sovereign aspect is where I draw lines and set boundaries for myself, if this aspect becomes too dominant, my relationships suffer. If I devalue it, the rest of my identity suffers.
Finding balance is first an understanding of what pillars make up the self, and then properly defining the necessary role each of the three play in governing one’s character and life.
As a side note, the names of the pillars may be distracting, what on earth is a curator, sovereign, or oracle in this sense?
Naming the pillars simply provide me with an archetypal, symbolic image that represents the different aspects of my own nature. They have meaning only to me, as my personal definition and expression of these archetypes are also unique to me.
The same would be true of any other person.
Finding symbolic ways of representing one’s own character and identity, help one to comprehend and work with the distinctions within their own make up or core nature.
Instead of seeing one’s identity as being divided into three perfectly equal structures, one’s identity is more unique and more lopsided than expected.
Asymmetrical Balance
Balance for an individual is more about making peace with the lopsidedness of one’s character than it is about trying to perfectly align every aspect of one’s nature with some universal or generic expectation and structure, whether social, cultural, religious, political, and so forth.
The beauty of the Golden Triangle and Mean, is the permission for distinct differences to coexist within a structure.
The Golden Mean illustrates the proper orbit, the spiral. But it also illustrates the need for imbalance, inequality, and lopsidedness within natural structures.
It represents a sort of sliding scale that remains off kilter, never landing in centrist idealism where all aspects of a natural structure or construct are in perfect affinity.
Instead, the beauty and balance is found in the motion.
When perfect imbalance occurs, the leaning toward this side or that creates a sort of rotation, an orbit, a spiral of growth.
Conclusion
Attempting to balance one’s own rhythms, nature, and orbit solely within outer expectations and structures, by attempting to align in perfect symmetry or equality is unnatural, and even, in a sense, ugly, because it is stagnate.
Like planting a variety of flowers in a straight line is boring, nature’s use of asymmetrical patterns that include a variety of colors, shapes, and genus, is geometrical pleasing and interesting to look at.
Nature’s dynamic diversity provides motion and movement that enriches and grows the soul.
When a person attempts to build and shape their character in the boring straight lines of cultural strictness, that person’s self-expression becomes lifeless and stagnate, not to mention the fact that by trying to harmonize oneself with someone else’s foreign and alien identity structures one creates within themselves an unnatural imbalance in their character and identity that does more harm than good.
Dis-ease has often been thought of as imbalance or a lack of harmonic resonance. If one is continually attempting to reshape their design to match another’s or a group of others, they are simply creating for themselves a perfect petri dish of dis-ease within their own unique identity structures.
One’s value, worth, and beauty is showcased best when asymmetrically and unequally allowed to grow and express unfettered by oppressive ideals of linear perfection.
Humans are perfectly imperfect. The balance within is perfectly imbalanced and kind of lopsided, but only in the sense that the Mean within cannot be measured by the Mean without.
The proper imbalance, or the off-center Mean that actualizes the uniqueness and sovereignty within each of us, creates the harmony, interest, beauty, and distinction that is individual identity.
No two humans are perfectly alike, even identical twins.
Centrist ideals of perfectionism and utopianism—that of needing all things to be equal—within a controlled and micro-managed structure of equality is an unnatural oppression.
All are unique, and that is geometrically and universally pleasing.
Balance, true balance, is found within the leaning into that kind of confident and individual distinction, and allowing for the lopsidedness of one’s character to be righted, not by social institutionalism, but by the innate harmony of one’s imbalanced and invaluable design.
[Image 1] courtesy of Unsplash
[Image 2] courtesy of The Collecto
[Image 3] Lopsided balance of the golden mean
[Image 4] Division of Identity
[Image 5] Identity pillars
[Image 6] My own identity pillars
[Image 7] Lopsided balance within core nature
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This simple fact, is why you are useful.