Keep moving

Life was busy. One month, years ago, I sat down to write and almost stopped at those three words.

Every so often I felt as if I was on a merry go round and the man who works the switch had fallen asleep. Round and round, and no way to get off.

I laughed about it even then. As busy as life got, it was the constant motion that made me feel whole. There was an energy in moving forward that I would not have found standing still.

Balance without trying

It is a funny thing. When I had the least amount of time, everything somehow got organized and done. When I was not thinking about being balanced at all, I usually was.

In Buddhist practice you are taught to stop thinking and pay attention to your breath. On my busiest days I paid attention to my breath mainly to check that I was still doing it.

I tried to keep up my spiritual reading. I tried to meditate and to practise quiet. Some days life got in the way. Long overtime days at work, mountains of laundry, the grocery shopping, homework help, drives to games, cooking, cleaning, birthdays, parties, family commitments and friends. There was very little time left over to stop and breathe.

And yet there was a kind of poetry in all that movement. A graceful sort of order that seemed to run itself. In the middle of the chaos I could see how balanced a person can become without even trying, through the plain steady motion of moving forward.

What the books leave out

We spend a lot of effort trying to be grounded and balanced. We read books about it and go to classes and workshops. Sometimes there is more to learn from living your life and stopping now and then to marvel at what you have already done.

If you are over 50, the merry go round may have slowed down by now. The house is quieter and nobody is waiting in the car. The lesson still holds. Balance tends to come from keeping on, and these days you get to choose the motion. A walk, a class, a garden, something new.

And if you remember the rushing years, give yourself some credit for them. All those evenings running late to the arena. All those trips through the drive through. There may have been something quite zen in it after all.

From the archive. First written for my journal years ago, and rewritten for life after 50.