Balance

Today's I'd like to write about the concept of "Balance".
This little understood concept is probably the cornerstone of everything there is in this World, including us. I will attempt to explain what I feel with two seemingly contradictory examples, one being Order and Chaos, the other Life and Death.

As it is said "There is Order in Chaos and Chaos in Order."
This seemingly contradictory saying is actually expressing a great truth. Order and Chaos are symbiotic concepts. Without Order, Chaos has no meaning and vice versa. Popular literature has always portrayed Order as "Good" and Chaos as "Bad". It is thought that if there would have been no Chaos, there would be perfection. But, this is wrong. Without Chaos, Order loses meaning. A basic example of this relationship would be the creation of the Universe. This Universe, the ultimate symbol of Perfection (Order), was itself created due to a Big Bang (Chaos).

Life and Death.
From time immemorial, humans have valued and loved life and at the same time, hated and feared death. Immortality is supposed to be the greatest gift which a human can receive. But again I ask, if Death were to cease to exist, would there be any meaning or value to Life? Right now, many of the "good" things in our life, like Love, Companionship, Affection etc., are so valued because we might lose them. If they could never be lost, would they have the same value? We would be like those stone sculptures we can see in caves, timeless, immortal but utterly useless.
There is no Life without Death. And there is no Death without Life.

Every culture has tried to pass on this knowledge in some form or the other, be it the God Shiva in Hinduism doing the "Tandava", the primordial dance of destruction and preservation or the Yin-Yang concept of Taoism. It is all the same.
To grasp one side and to reject the other is foolishness. We need both to exist. Humans have a tendancy of focussing excessively on one aspect and completely neglecting the other.

When we disturb the balance of life, we go against everything Nature has set up. To correct the balance, certain changes take place which we name as "problems". We have to understand that this is just Nature's way of correcting the imbalance we are causing. The sooner we understand this, the faster those problems will disappear.

"There is no answer to any of these questions. It's a matter of time and timing, of seas and seasons, of breathing in and breathing out. It's a matter of balance."
- Life 101: Everything We Wish We Had Learned About Life in School--But Didn't (The Life 101 Series)