Month: June 2019

Story of a tribal artist

Neera

I found Bhajju Shyam sitting quietly on a shelf of the Airbnb accommodation at my recent trip to Edinburgh. Of course not in person but in a book. If there is one thing I like about Airbnb, it is the unexpected discoveries I am going to make there, particularly of books.

Normally I wouldn’t have picked up this book in a bookstore. It was too thin for a coffee book, too simple as an art book and too scanty as a memoir. Yet it had something going for it that I read it in a single sitting, took photographs of it, researched the artist and writing a post about it a month later.

What was so special about it?

To start with, it’s the title, The London Jungle Book, based on Rudyard Kipling’s famous The Jungle Book it invites you to the adventures of a jungle boy in a different jungle. Then it’s the cover of the book, where a rooster is merged with Big Ben. The freshness of the story is the hook the alerts the reader to a new perspective on the things we take for granted. The beautiful narration by two polished writers (Gita Wolf and Sirish Rao) is also praiseworthy, which captures Bhajju’s voice perfectly, never overpowering it with their own. And finally Bhajju’s unique creativity and use of his traditional art form to express it. The book is a delight.

Bhajju Shyam is an artist from the Gond tribal village of Patangarh, in the forests of central India. “I never set out to be an artist,” he says in the book, “My mother painted the walls of our home, as is our tradition, and she would ask me to paint the parts she couldn’t reach.” The family sent their three children to school but were too poor to put them all through the full term. “One of us would have books, the other would have a uniform and the third would have a bag. If we were all one child, we would have made it through. But we were three and there wasn’t enough to go around.”

But Bhajju had something going for him. He had the opportunity to work for his uncle as an apprentice. His uncle happened to be Jangarh Singh Shyam, the most brilliant Gond artist of the time, and the one who brought Gond art from the wall of the village into the public eye. Bhajju started by filling in the fine patterns on Jangarh’s large canvases, but when his talent became apparent, Jangarh told him one day that the time had come to strike out on his own.

When Bhajju came to London his creativity got ignited through the cultural shock he experienced. Everything was different. He was feeling so many emotions at the same time. He expressed them in the only way he knew, his art.

“I have drawn my own face with 50-50 expression and all the thoughts tangled in the strands of my hair. I am thinking of everything I will leave behind, and I show these things using Gond symbols. The radio: the music I like to listen to when I work; the porcupine: our symbol to ward off danger; the cow: prosperity; the cart: contain all the necessities of life; the plough; the land that feeds us; the mango: my food; the rooster; the keeper of my time; the cot the palace of rest; the tree: the forest; the mouth (with the word language written in Hindi): my language; the other images are my children, my parents and my home.”

His naivety about the common things, things we take for granted, is a breath of fresh air. At one place he says,

“I had never been on a plane before, so I kept trying to get a glimpse of the machine that would carry me to London… The way it happened was like this. It was night and I couldn’t see anything outside. Inside there were only queues and lines of people. So it was queue up, get a stamp on a document, sit down on a row of seats, wait. Then queue up again, another stamp, another row of seats. After this had gone on for a while and we had sat down in one more row of seat in a sort of long waiting room, I asked the man sitting next to me, “When are they finally going to let us get on the plane?” He looked at me strangely and said, “My friend, we’re inside it!”

His fresh perspective about everything is enchanting: viewing England from air for the first time and seeing it like a green sari surrounded by sea creatures; perceiving Big Ben as the timekeeper of London and comparing it to rooster, the timekeeper in his village; thinking of Bus number 30 as a dog, a loyal friend; the London Underground a giant earthworm, and English people as bats that come out to play at night.

So impressed was I with Bhajju’s work and his story that I decided to visit the restaurant where he had done the work. His work has a beautiful mix of innocence and sophistication.

Bhajju’s work began to be known throughout India, and his first international exposure cam in 1998 when he was part of a group exhibition at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. Since then his work has been shown in the UK, Germany, Holland, and Russia. In 2001, he received a state award for Best Indigenous Artist.

Since then Bhajju art is captured in many books The Night Life of Trees, The Flight of the Mermaid, Alone in the Jungle, Creations, That’s How I See Things.

If you get a chance do get one of his books. Also read Maria Popova’s post The London Jungle Book: What an Indian Tribal Artist Can Teach Us About Rediscovering Our Capacity for Everyday Wonder.

The World Exists To Be Put On a Postcard

Neera

That is the name of exhibition running at The British Museum.

Postcard? When was the last time you heard the word?

Have you received one lately?

Even more so have you sent one lately?

Have you ever thought of postcards as work of art?

Some of the well-known artists did. At least for a period of time. During the 1960s and 1970s postcards were used as artistic medium to highlight political and social issues, such as feminism, anti-war protest and the fight against AIDS.

The World Exists To Be Put On A Postcard highlights a selection of 300 works from more than 1,000 artists’ postcards recently gifted to The British Museum by the novelist and former art dealer, Jeremy Cooper.

I happened to be in the museum to witness this exhibition and was blown away by what could be achieved through humble postcards.

The exhibition has works ranging from feminist artists such as Lynda Benglis and Hannah Wilke, to Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s anti-Vietnam War is Over postcard.

Yoko Ono and John Lennon, War is Over!, 1969–1970. © Yoko Ono and John Lennon 1969.

According to The British Museum blog the artists’ postcard began as a child of the Conceptual and Fluxus movements of the 1960s.

Artists connected with the Fluxus movement often used postcards or ‘mail art’ as part of their artistic practice. In the 1960s and 1970s, the postcard embodied the movement’s engagement with experimental art forms and expressed a disenchantment with the elitism of the art world. The experimental Fluxus artist Ben Vautier created what must be one of the most confusing postcards ever made. It reveals a space on both sides of the card for the address, enabling the writer to send the card to two people at once. When it arrives at the post office, the question is, ‘who should it be posted to’? This dilemma is reflected in the title of the card, The Postman’s Choice.

The British Museum
Ben Vautier, The Postman’s Choice, 1965–1967.

The writer Jeremy Cooper started collecting them in 2008 after an illness because he wanted to reconnect with art without spending huge sums of money. Through dealers and eBay, Cooper has steadily built a vast collection of more than 8,000 works examples, a reflection of the surprising number of artists who have engaged with the medium since the 1960s.

The Guardian

I particularly liked the a postcard by Guerrilla Girls which outlines the benefits of being a woman artist such as working without the pressure of success and not having to be in shows with men.

There were many which had provocative slogans such as “Beethoven was a lesbian” and “I don’t give a shit what your house is worth.”

Certainly the most shocking one was of a man suspended from hooks while photographers took pictures. The British Museum blog has artist approved picture on the site. The artist’s name is Stelarc. He was born in Cyprus and grew up in Melbourne. He specialises in self-inflicting performances. His preferred method of documenting and promoting his work was through postcards.

Overall an engaging exhibition. I am so glad I happen to be in London at the right time.

Words are better than 1000 pictures

Neera

On my recent trip to the UK and Paris, I took thousands of pictures but whenever I think about the trip none of those come to mind. What comes to mind are the moments that were not captured in any of the pictures.

Photos are wonderful and we take so many of them when traveling but there is something about the written word that evokes a stronger sense of place and person. The little entries I made in my diary transport me to those places instantly.

Here is one:

“It is six thirty in the evening, I am walking back from Stonehenge. Sun is still bright. White clouds against the blue sky look magical. Sky is so low here. I feel if I keep walking I will be able to touch it just at the edge of earth. There is something special about this place and it is not the sky. Not even the landscape. It is the silence. Even though the place is full of tourists it is still very quiet here. May be it is the silence of the dead.”

And this one:

“It is five in the evening and I have made it to the top of the Arthur Seat in Edinburgh. The wind is so strong that both my husband and daughter decided not to climb the top rock. It is hard to find footing on the pointed and irregularly shaped volcanic rocks. I haven’t come so far to give it up now. Before they can stop me I start climbing, inch by inch, carefully balancing on almost vertical rock. Rock was not that dangerous, it was the wind. I get to the top and get the photo taken. I do not climb for the photo. I climb to test my resolve.”

But the accompanying photo does not capture any of that.

Neither do any of the photos capture the smell of the highland air, the taste of the Scotland water, the thrust of the Oxford Street crowd or the music at the Paris pub. I couldn’t take photos of my aching feet which made me regret every day that I didn’t pack my hiking shoes with ankle support.

I was not fast enough to take pictures of the double rainbow I saw from the train while going to Paris, neither was I ready to capture the fireworks which started unexpectedly when we were at the top of the Eiffel Tower. Those pictures are itched in my memory forever without the aid of the camera.

You can’t taste a snapshot.

“I am in the Selfridge, sitting in a cupcake eatery, order a cookies and cream cheesecake which my husband are going to share. I take the first spoonful; the creamy sweetness melts in my mouth. I get up declaring ‘I want one all for myself.'”

Bang! the memory floods back and I am back in the eatery tasting the cheesecake once again.

Did I take any pictures of the rude guy who double-parked his car just behind ours making us wait for half an hour, in rain, at Glenfinnan where we stopped to see the Harry Potter bridge? Even if I did, it wouldn’t have told the story.

Or these stories:

“We are walking back from a local pub in rain, hoodies on, umbrellas up, and between my daughter’s constant moaning that we didn’t let her call an Uber for a ten minute walk back home. My son-in-law is warning us not to step on dog-pooh and next moment he steps on one. The drama that followed afterwards was fun to watch. “There is one thing I ask you each time we go out, not to walk on dog-pooh, and you can’t even do that,” goes my daughter. At home, my son-in-law thrusts the shoe under her nose, “Would you like to smell it to make sure it’s dog-pooh and not just mud.” His action starts another row. Half an hour later, husband wife team is still on balcony trying to clean the shoe with wet-ones and earbuds.”

Or this one which will be told in dinner parties for years to come.

“I am standing in a line to go to toilet at Louvre museum. The line is so long that it is flowing out of the female toilets, into the corridor, way past the men’s toilet to the outside lobby while men are in-and-out within minutes. A young guy is trying to persuade his female companions to used men’s toilets. “What are the danger’s of exposure?” asks one of his lady friend. “Try using the first two cubicles,” he advises. Next minute a number of women raid the men’s toilet including me. Once you are inside there is no going back. Only empty cubicle was number 4. So I dash to it, praying all the time that when I get out there is no one using the urinal.”

I remember once reading about a kindergarten teacher who taught her class of five-years-olds how to take mental pictures at a beach excursion. “Take a good look at the sea… and the sky… and the clouds. Notice the color. Now close your eyes and try to see them with your mind’s eye. Take a deep breath and smell in the salty air, feel the wind on your cheeks, hear the sound of the waves. Lock all these in your memory. You will never forget it.”

I think this is the way to take pictures on holiday. With the ease of mobile phones, we spend all our time taking pictures rather than taking in. Maybe in your next travel, we can use the kindergarten teacher’s technique to take a mental picture and enjoy our holidays even more.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Twentieth anniversary of ‘blogs’

Neera

The year 2019 marks the twentieth anniversary when the word ‘blog’ was officially accepted in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Even if you consider the history of the internet, it is not so long ago. Then again, it’s only in the past five to ten years that they have really taken off and have become an important part of the online landscape.

That got me intrigued, so I went digging. A Brief History of Blogging post has lots of interesting information:

“It’s generally recognized that the first blog was Links.net, created by Justin Hall, while he was a Swarthmore College student in 1994. Of course, at that time they weren’t called blogs, and he just referred to it as his personal homepage.

It wasn’t until 1997 that the term “weblog” was coined. The word’s creation has been attributed to Jorn Barger, of the influential early blog Robot Wisdom. The term was created to reflect the process of “logging the web” as he browsed.

1998 marks the first known instance of a blog on a traditional news site when Jonathan Dube blogged Hurricane Bonnie for The Charlotte Observer.

“Weblog” was shortened to “blog” in 1999 by programmer Peter Merholz. It’s not until five years later that Merriam-Webster declares the word their word of the year.

The original blogs were updated manually, often linked from a central home page or archive. This wasn’t very efficient, but unless you were a programmer who could create your own custom blogging platform, there weren’t any other options, to begin with.

During these early years, a few different “blogging” platforms cropped up. LiveJournal is probably the most recognizable of the early sites.

And then in 1999, the platform that would later become Blogger was started by Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan at Pyra Labs. Blogger is largely responsible for bringing blogging to the mainstream.”

It’s 20 years since the birth of the word blog, if not of the act. During these twenty years technologies, kept coming and going. It was all about the web first, then AOL, then “push,” then Web 2.0, then the email was “dead.” Then came social media, newsletters, Slacks, and podcasts.

“Throughout, blogs just stayed quietly in the background. Self-publishing is at the heart of the healthy internet. It’s truly self-publishing when the URL and the means of production are your own,” wrote Marc Weidenbaum in his blog Disquiet.

Marc Weidenbaum urges, “If you garden, blog it (please). If you have a pet monkey, blog it. If you are the repository of some dwindling or otherwise threatened culture, blog it. If you harbor considered thoughts about your profession, blog it.”

Blogs are gardens for ideas. Like a gardener, you plant ideas in a blog and then watch which one grows to become a healthy plant and which one never germinate. You learn how to prepare the ground, which makes them grow, and how to protect them from predators.

Blogging is a must for aspiring writers. You will grow and refine as a writer much quicker than you would write in your journals and diaries. You can still be writing for yourself but only better. The act of hitting the publish button at the end of the day’s writing improves your writing many times. Get a small blog growing in a corner somewhere in the vast land of the Internet and write. Don’t worry about page views, don’t bother with SEOs, or social media promotions, just write.

Blogs are thinking place for artists, somewhere to try out their half-baked thoughts and work on them till they are fully formed. Austin Kleon writes in his book Keep Going:

A blog is the ideal machine for turning flow into stock: One little blog post is nothing on its own, but publish a thousand blog posts over a decade, and it turns into your life’s work. My blog has been my sketchbook, my studio, my gallery, my storefront and my salon. Absolutely everything good that has happened in my career can be traced back to my blog. My books, my art shows, my speaking gigs, some of my best friendships – they all exists because I have my own little piece of turf on the Internet.

Don’t think of your website as a self-promotion machine, think of it as a self-invention machine. Online, you can become the person you really want to be. Fill your website with your work, your ideas and the stuff you care about. Stick with it, maintain it and let it change with you over time.

The beauty of owning your own turf is that you can do whatever you want with it.

Have you been blogging? What are your thoughts about blogging? I would like to know about your blogging journey. Share it with me through the comments section below.

Photo by Francesco Gallarotti on Unsplash

Bullshit Jobs

Neera 1 Comment

In 2013, London-based anthropologist and anarchist activist, David Graeber wrote an essay On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs which went viral. In the article, he argued that the productivity benefits of automation have not led to a 15-hour workweek, as predicted by economist John Maynard Keynes in 1930 but instead to the creation of a lot of “bullshit jobs.”

What is a “bullshit job?”

Graeber defines bullshit job as, “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”

The author contends that more than half of societal work is pointless, both large parts of some jobs and, as he describes, five types of entirely pointless jobs:

  1. flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants
  2. goons, who act aggressively on behalf of their employers, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations specialists
  3. duct tapers, who ameliorate preventable problems, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code, airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags don’t arrive
  4. box tickers, who use paperwork or gestures as a proxy for action, e.g., performance managers, in-house magazine journalists, leisure coordinators
  5. taskmasters, managers—or creators of extra work for—those who don’t need it, e.g., middle management, leadership professional

He argues that by now we are supposed to be working fewer hours on fewer days of the week, as technology automates production. But this hasn’t happened – instead, there are new industries that are in themselves not very socially useful, and more jobs are designed merely to administer, support, and secure them.

His article, in August 2013, had over one million hits, crashed the website of its publisher, the radical magazine Strike! The essay was subsequently translated into 12 languages and became a basis for a YouGov poll, in which 37 percent of surveyed Britons thought that their jobs did not contribute meaningfully to the world.

In May 2018 Graeber revised his case into a book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory in which he presented hundreds of testimonials of bullshit jobs he has received. Although the book doesn’t present any more substance than the article itself, by the end of 2018, it was translated into at least a dozen of languages such as German, Norwegian, Swedish, French, Italian, Spanish, Czech, Romanian and Russian to name a few.

Several bogs sprouted. Comments sections filled up with confessions from white-collar professionals people wrote Graeber asking for guidance or to tell him that he had inspired them to quit their jobs to find something more meaningful. One response he got was from the comments section of Australia’s The Canberra Times:

“Wow! Nail on the head! I am a corporate lawyer (tax litigator to be specific). I contribute nothing to this world and am utterly miserable all of the time. I don’t like it when people have the nerve to say “Why to do it, then?” because it is so clearly not that simple. It so happens to be the only way right now for me to contribute to the 1% in such a significant way so as to reward me with a house in Sydney to raise my future kids… Thanks to technology, we are probably as productive in two days as we previously were in five. But thanks to greed and some busy-bee syndrome of productivity, we are still asked to slave away for the profit of others ahead of our own nonremunerated ambitions. Whether you believe in intelligent design or evolution, humans were not made to work – so to me, this is all just greed propped up by inflated prices of necessities.”

Having worked in a ‘bullshit job’ myself for several years, I know how utterly draining and soul-crushing that existence is. I finally quit. Yet it was not easy to let go. So addicted we become to that way of living. Another reason we continue to suffer pointless work is we don’t know a way out. I found that way out in creativity. Today I am happier and feel fulfilled.

In the book, Graeber tells the story of a corporate lawyer who went on to become a happy singer in an indie rock band when he became disillusioned with his job as a corporate lawyer. In another story, a Spanish civil servant skipped work for six years to study philosophy and became an expert in Spinoza before being found out. But he was a much happier man by then.

If Graeber is right in concluding that this is not an economic problem but a political and moral one, then the solution cannot be economic either.

How have so many humans reached the point where they accept that even miserable, unnecessary work is actually superior to no work at all?

We cannot continue to justify our bullshit job to support our contemporary living. We can’t keep on feeding ourselves the lie that the pains of dull work are suitable justification for the ability to fulfill our material desires. We can’t let pointless work destroy our minds and bodies.

We are in a time in history like no other when technology has given so much power to ordinary people. Couple that with human creativity and each one of us can do amazing things with our lives.

Top photo by Andrea Natali on Unsplash

Finding Balance

Neera

Life is about balance. We all know that. But it is too hard to find balance in today’s life. We are juggling too many things – work, family, friends, home, food, health, exercise, consumption, pleasure, leisure, and beliefs.

Often we are overwhelmed and constantly complain that there’s just not enough time in the day to do everything we need to do.

Often balance is perceived as mental and emotional stability, a calm state where equal time and attention can be given to every important aspect of our lives. But then for some people, a balanced life is a virtuous life, a life led in accordance with one’s values. Even over time, society’s perception of balance has changed. Before embarking into what the perfect state of balance I would like to be in, I decided to have a look at what the great philosophers of our times have said about a balanced life.

Gautama Buddha (563-483 BCE) was perhaps the first to make ‘balanced life’ desirable by introducing the middle path. On one occasion the Blessed One addressed the group of monks:

“Monks, these two extremes ought not to be practiced by one who has gone forth from the household life. There is addiction to indulgence of sense-pleasure, which is low, coarse, the way of ordinary people; and there is addiction to self-mortification, which is painful, unworthy and unprofitable. Avoiding both these extremes, the Perfect One has realized the Middle Path; it gives vision, gives knowledge, and leads to calm, insights, enlightenment and Nirvana. And what is that Middle Path…It is the Noble Eightfold path namely: right understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration.

Confucius (551-479 BCE) who was around the same time as Buddha suggested the doctrine of mean:

What Heaven has conferred is called The Nature; an accordance with this nature is called The Path of duty; the regulation of this path is called Instruction. The path may not be left for an instant. If it could be left, it would not be the path. On this account, the superior man does not wait till he sees things to be cautious, nor till he hears things to be apprehensive. There is nothing more visible than what is secret and nothing more manifest than what is minute. Therefore a superior man is watchful over himself when he is alone. While there are no strings of pleasure, anger, sorrow, or joy the mind may be said to be in the state of Equilibrium. When those feelings have been stirred, and they act in their due degree, there ensues what may be called the state of Harmony. This Equilibrium is the great root from which grows all the human actings in the world, and this Harmony is the universal path which they should all pursue.

In western philosophy, the principle of balanced living was first introduced by Aristotle (384-322 BCE). In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle uses the metaphor of a craftsman creating an excellent work to illustrate his ideal of the golden mean. He explains excellence in art and craft, describes a point where nothing remains either to be added or taken away – because to do either would diminish the result. The achievement is an equipoise that’s the opposite of average. He argues:

First, then we must consider this fact: that it is in the nature of moral qualities that they are destroyed by deficiency and excess, just as we can see (since we have to use the evidence of visible facts to throw light on those that are invisible) in case of health and strength. For both excessive insufficient exercise destroy one’s strength, and both eating and drinking too much or too little destroy health, whereas the right quantity produces, increases and preserves it. So it is the same with temperance, courage and the other virtues. The man who shuns and fears everything and stands up to nothing becomes a coward; the man who is afraid of nothing at all, but marches up to every danger, becomes foolhardy. Similarly, the man who indulges in every pleasure and refrains from none becomes licentious; but if a man behaves like a boor and turns his back to every pleasure, he is a case of insensibility. Thus temperance and courage are destroyed by excess and deficiency and preserved by the mean.

Denis Diderot (1809-1882) a French philosopher, writer, and a prominent figure during the Age of Enlightenment presents the case for living in a moment.

What is this world? A complex whole, subject to endless revolutions. All these revolutions show a continual tendency to destruction; a swift succession of beings who follow one another, press forward and vanish; a fleeting symmetry; the order of a moment. I reproached you just now with estimating the perfection of things by you own capacity; and I might accuse you here of measuring its duration by the length of your own days. You judge of the continuous existence of the world, as an ephemeral insect might judge of yours. The world is eternal for you, as you are eternal to the being that lives but for an instance. Yet the insect is more reasonable of the two. For what a prodigious succession of ephemeral generations attests your eternity! What an immeasurable tradition! Yet shell we all pass away, without the possibility of assigning either the real extension that we filled in space, or the precise time that we shall have endured. Time, matter, space – all, it may be, are no more than a point.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) a German-American philosopher and political theorist describes balance as a framework of stability:

Man’s urge for change and his need for stability have always balanced and checked each other, and our current vocabulary, which distinguishes between two factions, the progressives and the conservatives, indicates a state of affairs in which this balance has been thrown out of order. No civilization – the man-made artefact to house successive generations – would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change. Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other.

All these philosophers have looked at ‘balanced life’ with different lenses. But their philosophies can be difficult to apply to modern situations without lapsing into lifestyle banishment.

There’s no such problem with a more recent thinker, writes Tom Chatfield in an article in New Philosopher, whose work engaged ferociously with the limitations of all systems – and in particular the inadequacy of science and technology when it came to filling the void once occupied by gods.

Friedrich Nietzsche was a sick man for most of his life, plagued by near blindness, paralyzing migraines, and collapses that kept him bed-bound for weeks. As a result, much of his philosophy was written in terse, exalted bursts, inspired by days spent walking in the Alps.

In a recent biography of Nietzsche, I am Dynamite!the writer Sue Prideaux describes these oscillations as a form of destruction and renewal.

Every illness was a death, a dip down not Hades. Every recuperation was a joyful rebirth, a regeneration. This mode of existence refreshed him. Neuschmecken (‘new-tasting) was his word for it. During each fleeting recuperation the world gleamed anew. And so each recuperation became not only his own rebirth, but also the birth of a whole new world, a new set of problems that demanded new answers.”

Nietzsche’s was a philosophy neither of balance nor harmony, but of creative destruction. He refused answers and resolutions, ending his greatest works with an ellipsis rather than a conclusion. “Philosophy as I have understood and live it,” he wrote in the Foreword to Ecce Homo, “is voluntary living in ice and high mountains – a seeking after everything strange and questionable in existence, all that has hitherto been excommunicated by morality.”

What is wrong with wishing to live a balanced life? Nothing so long as you accept that balance implies measures, priorities, and values all of which can and must be contested if they are not to be hollowed out.

Then F. Diane Barth writes in Psychology Today:

Balance is not a final goal, but an ongoing process. Being balanced does not mean being calm, relaxed, and content all of the time. Balance often occurs only for a fleeting moment, but it can reappear over and over again. Rather than trying to stay balanced, think of yourself as practicing balancing, over and over again. I love that many yoga teachers talk about yoga as a “practice” – the goal is not to become great at it, but to keep practicing it. You often hear the comment that it’s good to fall – it means you were trying. The same is true in life. As long as we keep practicing finding balance, we will find one. Of course, we will lose it. But we will find it again.

She illustrates it with an example:

In an interview on NPR, the actor Ki Hong Lee, who appears in the film, The Maze Runner, makes this point beautifully. He says a friend once asked what his goal was in life and he answered, “to win the Academy Award for my acting.” When asked the same question, his friend said,  “to be a working actor everyday for the rest of my life.” Ki Hong Lee was blown away by the realization that his friend’s goal was about the process of living. It was about balance.

So where does it leave me?

I came up with ten commitments to bring balance in my life.

What do you do to bring balance in your life? Do you have any personal philosophy you want to share with me? Have you got any quotes from great philosophers? Share them with us from the comments section below.

Top photo by Leio McLaren (@leiomclaren) on Unsplash