Everything in life takes balance. Absolutely everything. Without balance, any situation becomes chaos. Emotions take over or legalism squashes you. It is like a swinging pendulum, once it swings to one side or the other, it takes work to get it stopped and balanced in the middle again. 

Last weekend I went camping with my family. The girls stayed in a travel trailer and the boys stayed in the tent. I helped set up the trailer and apparently didn’t get it completely stable and each time we moved, the trailer rocked a bit. It wasn’t enough to cause problems until we were in bed and someone rolled over abruptly. But for the weekend, it wasn’t noticeable enough to fix it. 

Fast forward to the ride home in a big truck pulling a trailer- the swaying continued. By the time we got home I was motion sick. Just thinking about the swaying still makes me a bit uneasy. I came in the house and laid in my bed with a pounding headache, still feeling the sway. After resting in the stillness for quite a while, I was able to reset a bit and my headache went away. 

I stepped into the trailer to clean it a couple days later and found that I couldn’t do it. The instability was too much. 

What I began to recognize was how easily we get off balanced without really noticing. It may take days for it to take its toll on you enough that you have to stop and reset. But if we step into the already unstable place, we will notice it right away. 

The current state of our world and our country and the disunity that screams at us through the news stories has so many of us off balance. It started slow several years ago and has ramped up at a pace that many of us don’t readily notice too great a sway to follow our emotions or the counter swing to pure logic. We just go with whatever we see or hear. And because we don’t feel the sway, we don’t see the need to balance ourselves. 

I can see how we have gotten so out of balance, and I have no answers on how to rebalance. But I hope we can each take a look at what we are doing, how we are treating others (not how others are treating us) especially on social media platforms, and begin to rebalance ourselves. We can love without agreeing, we can be kind without accepting certain behaviors, we can give grace and mercy to those around us and realize what people want most is to be known and heard. 

With women’s issues at the forefront of the fight today, I challenge us, as women, to reach out to other women and hear what they have to say. Don’t go in defensive if their views are different. Wait to be asked for your thoughts or opinions. Get to know them, hear them. Treat them the way you want to be treated. 

We can only find balance once we are willing to recognize the sway we are under.