A QUESTION OF BALANCE

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say something heretical. Balance in your kids' lives isn't all that helpful...or realistic. Especially when it comes to raising and teaching children. Allow me to clarify.

Self-help balance

There are several types of balance. There’s the kind they talk about in the self-help publishing industry (Seven Habits of a Balanced Life, Fourteen Rules to Achieving Perfect Harmony, Twelve Steps to Not Falling on Your Face, etc.) in which you are exhorted not to work too hard but make time for your family and, of course, there’s that all-important time for yourself. Well, I’m not going to argue with that. Who would? Why do we need endless shelves of 214 page books on the subject? (I usually get the whole point of these books off the fly leaf blurb and thus save $29.95). It might be refreshing, for a change, to see an iconoclastic title like Eleven Steps to Working Yourself to Death. But if we face the truth, the fact is that in this economy and this country, if you don’t work yourself to death, you won’t survive. It’s easy to say you put your kids ahead of your career, but if you have to take the Red Eye to Atlanta to show smiley face to a cranky client to keep his business, you’ll miss The School Holiday Pageant.

Philosophical balance

And there’s the balance that Buddhists, Sufis, and Stoics talk about in which you find the true path to enlightenment up the Middle Way. My 10^th Grade biology teacher, Mr. Vogel, used to say, “Everything in Moderation,” daily pointing out to us that there was a lethal dose of everything. I’m sure all you parents ankle-deep in soccer mud can agree with that. Too much soccer affects homework. Too much homework affects play. Too much play affects TV watching time. Balance is good. Not too much, not too little. Just right. Aahhhh! But the truth is some things will kill you in even the tiniest doses, like anthrax bacilli. And if you want to be good at something like soccer or ballet or neuralopthamology, you’ll have to sacrifice a lot of Q time with the family.

Balance the universe on your nose

But the balance that I think is the greatest bogus is the popular notion that everything in the universe exists in equilibrium. We teach our children about ecology and make them hyper-sensitive about the death of pill bugs and draining malarial infested swamps (excuse me, “wetlands”). They learn that any action we take upsets the delicate “balance” of nature. So we should take no action at all. We teach them to accept all ideas as valid or merely alternate points of view, so we should not challenge anyone’s ideas or opinions. That would be impolite. And politeness is another artifact of this theory of a universe in equilibrium. We’re polite when others are rude to us, or thoughtless, or incompetent, or boorish because we seek to preserve the social calm. We don’t want to cause any trouble.

This is the idea of balance that I really think is hooey. The universe exists in anything but equilibrium. It is a seething mass of unpredictable events. What I’m talking about is the kind of disequilibrium that turns your disruptive fourth grader into a model fifth grader in one summer; or that allows a couple of decent, loving, conscientious school teachers to raise a Kip Kinkle to kill them and several classmates. If we could time-lapse our kids for eighteen years, we’d observe them erupting out of smooth, adorable little babies like Incredible Hulks. It’s frightening. No one knows what kind of adults they’ll become. There are stories of well-balanced, supportive families unleashing wackos on the world (look at Franz Kafka!). And there are other stories of incredibly dysfunctional families giving us well-adjusted, productive citizens. There’s no way to predict it.

Balance is for the dead

When your kids learn to ride a bicycle, they aren’t learning balance, they’re learning to make hundreds of tiny muscular adjustments to keep from falling over. It isn’t the gyroscopic balance of the bike that keeps it upright. If you think otherwise, try pushing a riderless bike away from you and see how long it stays up. In the same way, as they grow and learn, they are making millions of tiny muscular and neural adjustments everyday to cope with the hurricane of forces acting on them. It’s nerve -wracking. Balance implies a state of rest, like a three legged stool. But our kids never rest. We never rest. Life is just too unpredictable to rest. Rest when you’re dead.

Chaos under our noses

Yesterday Cheryl and Ellen witnessed a tiny example of what I’m talking about. Outside one of our windows was a beautiful spider’s web. A small, leggy bug was struggling in the web. Soon the resident spider came down to the bug and the girls thought they would be entertained with the grisly sight of the helpless insect being sucked dry. Instead, the spider proceeded to cut the bug free of the web. She worked diligently and carefully, cutting away all the threads imprisoning the bug, finally lowering the kicking thing down to the sill where it scampered away to freedom. None of us knew what to make of this phenomenon. Spiders aren’t altruistic. They aren’t Buddhists. They are relentless, merciless predators. That’s where they fit into the ecosystem. Yet here was a spider acting like an arthropodic St. Francis…like Miss Spider. That’s why the universe isn’t in equilibrium. This kind of stuff probably happens constantly right under our noses and we don’t even notice it. Maybe this spider will spread a new religion of kindness to all spiders. Maybe she’ll die of misguided starvation.

If we really want to teach our kids how to cope with life, we should teach them to scorn the idea of a balanced world and be ready for the unpredictable. There are no eco-systems, only eco-chaos. El Nino is the norm not the exception. Divorce happens to the nicest families. The NASDAQ takes a dive for no reason. The next Ice Age could start any time. And a man who smokes two packs a day lives to be a hundred.

Balance is bunk. Chaos rules.