Seeking balance

When you live as close to the water as we do, you see lots of different types of watercraft over the course of a year.  So when this young lady propelled herself past my living room window the other day,  I wasn't struck so much by the novelty of her craft as by the incredible balance required to make it work.  Though I'm not quite old enough yet to be terribly unsteady on my feet, I definitely lost some sense of balance with the onset of trifocals, and so I would no longer consider tackling this particular mode of transportation.

But there are other sorts of balance that do seem to improve with age and experience.  There's the balance that sits apart from judgment, the sort that assumes that whatever you've done or seen or said, there might be another side to the story. And there's equanimity, the sort of balance that modulates emotional response, or engagement -- the balance between highs and lows, the sort that understands the wheel is always going round and circumstances are always changing.

As an artist, I do still struggle with both of those, particularly the second.  But I do believe I've grown better at it with age.  And I know that the ongoing struggle to achieve balance also fuels my creativity, and finds expression there as well.  But now I wonder -- knowing my husband's strong sense of balance at both the physical and emotional levels -- if by working on one, we might conceivably strengthen the other?