Adjust Your Sails

Balance.

It's one of the goals many people have in life--to achieve balance. Work, play, health, fun. Like holding a pencil on your finger, we create financial budgets and time pie charts trying to find the sweet spot necessary to live the happiest, most fulfilling life possible. How much self-care is necessary to prevent us from falling into despair's murky depths? What touch points of reality prevent me from soaring too close to the sun and getting burned?

Except that achieving perfect balance is a myth. 

Balance is not a fixed destination that we arrive at, rather, it is a constant shifting and adjusting, taking multiple factors into consideration as we navigate the journey of life. 

Balance is much more similar to the concept of adjusting the sails of a sailboat. A sailboat utilizes fabric strung on a pole to capture the wind to propel through the water with a board for stability, and a second board for directional control. All in all, control on a sailboat is pretty limited--you can adjust the sail and the rudder but that is about it. 

It is a tricky thing to manipulate the sail and the rudder just right in order to make continuous motion through the water, and even then movement often isn’t continuous. There’s moments of calm. At other times you move through the water quickly and the boat rolls to one side or the other and capsizing feels imminent. It is navigating the oscillation of freedom and feeling stuck, of exhilaration and frustration. The more you lean into the rhythm of adjusting, the better you are able to enjoy the journey.

So too is living life--the more you lean into the rhythm of change, the better you are able to enjoy the journey. It's hard though, because part of leaning into the rhythm of change means leaning into letting go of control. Which is ironic, because most of what we see as control is an illusion. Just like with sailing, there is very little we can actually control. We try, often because we think if we can have more control we can somehow prevent bad things from happening; if we have more control we can keep the pain away. Just like we can't control the wind, we cannot control our circumstances. Just like adjusting the sail and the rudder in response to the changes in the wind, we can control how we respond to the circumstances. 

I will say, this is much easier to do on a boat than in life. In life, we have all sorts of things that impact how we respond. And yes, there are ways in which we contribute to creating the circumstances that we find ourselves in. But, just like you can learn to read the wind better and adjust the sail and rudder more precisely in response to the wind, you can learn to recognize patterns in circumstances and seasons and adjust your response accordingly. You learn to guess at what might be in the future based off of the present, and make adjustments accordingly. 

Life can be a grand adventure if you let it be; learn to adjust the sails accordingly.