Perhaps if we consider another B word...
Join the Conversation
Please share your thoughts below.
The author E.B. White, who gave us Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little among his more than two dozen works, is credited with the following quote:
I arise in the morning with the desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
On any given weekend morning, when the contours of the day aren’t already imposed upon us by weekday work demands, Shelly and I commonly spend time considering how we might allot measures of our day into what we have to do and what we want to do. This amounts to a reprisal of Aesop’s The Ant and the Grasshopper as influenced by caffeine and meteorological circumstance. Most commonly, we try to git ‘er dun in the morning so that the afternoon can be spent in the enjoyment of something, without the worry of still gotta do that.
It is within such frameworks and life circumstances that people commonly find themselves speaking in terms and aphorisms that relate to the word balance. Balance is the suddenly and clatteringly understood concept for the person picking up Jenga pieces, the hope of anyone doing end of month work within their checkbook. Balance is a good thing, but it is fraught by the reality that its worth is more understood in its absence than in its existence. My best appreciation for balance is often when I’m out of it.
A cinematic masterpiece, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi poignantly and harrowingly offers a civilization-level depiction of that Hopi Indian word – life out of balance.
What’s more, there is no description to being in balance other than that – being in balance. Balance is constricted to a basic tautology – it is either present or absent. It is its own endgame. Some people might use the word harmony to describe a state of balance, but harmony is more truly something that is achieved when we use another b word.
It is perhaps worth wondering if our innate desire for balance is in some spin-cycle way fed by our tendency toward polarization; by our perhaps unrecognized preference to distinguish and separate things. To psycho-cognitively tell ourselves that things are most fully understood in their discreteness. It is a commendation to refer to someone as “a person of distinction” – it is an elevation of singularity.
My challenge to balance, therefore, is whether it inherently relegates us to OR. Whether it fosters or imposes a framework of individualism and binarism. Progenies of such a framework include comparison, competition, bias. Is it inherent, then, when we focus on balance, that we subconsciously and unwittingly desire to move the goalposts on either side of the OR farther away from one another? Are we drawn to widening the differential, increasing the voltage? If we are inclined to understand and appreciate things in their separateness, then do we seek to etch and define more than…
blend?
The other b word.
If balance is its own endgame, what do we get when we think not in terms of distinction but of connection? All sorts of new things.
Color
By blending varying levels of the three primary colors of light – red, green and blue – we can produce 16,777,216 colors that are visible to the human eye. To the right are four hoverboard samples of the purple family, for which we collectively have more than 140 unique names.
Flavor
Just like with palettes, palates love to experience things in blendedness with one another. Within recent decades a fifth flavor has been officially added to the longstanding primary four in Western culture such that we now recognize the tastiness of life as combinations of salty, sweet, bitter, sour and savory.
Sound
When it comes to music, our ears are pre-tuned to experience sounds in their amalgam, not as separate entities. Any time someone strums a guitar, they are not playing just notes, but chords. There are over 1500 musical instruments across the world, and each is happily disposed to welcome the accompaniment of the others. Here is where harmony truly belongs – in the collective blend of instrumentation and voices.
With an acknowledgement that not all things go together tastefully or harmoniously (looking at you, orange juice and toothpaste), it is worth considering how much invention is lost when we focus first on the discreteness of things. What if we more readily recognized things in a manner of attitudinal pointillism, wherein the value of things was seen in their contribution to a greater whole?
What might the difference be if we brought a greater sense of blend to subject matters in education? What if we focused a bit less on focus and encouraged students outward and upward toward a greater understanding of perspective and integration?
Nowhere are the downsides of the balance optic more observable than in political discourse today. Here is where they put the fact in factious. Why is it that the potential for a greater good is perpetually coopted by the sophism that blending ideas represents the forfeiture of their individual worth? Would it be so bad if some conservative chocolate landed in a little liberal peanut butter?
Such is not to say that blend isn’t also fraught with problematic derivatives. If the exaggeration of balance is polarization, the degradation of blend is blur. Polarization leads to extremism and blur leads to confusion. It is bad to be entrenched, but it is perhaps no better to be lost. Neither contributes to a greater good.
That being said, I believe we have a bias toward bias; a preference for OR over AND. Yet there are so many wonders in life that beckon us beyond this bias. The marbled serenity in the colors of the sunset, the rhapsody in the sounds of the symphony, the tastefulness in the flavors of foods – these are all born of blend. They produce something in togetherness the sum of which is beyond their individual identity. There is no point to them, because they cannot be reduced to one.
I have noted in writing this that the thoughts here may suffer from being cobbled, which leaves this more a testimony to blend than a testament of it. I hope the pursuit of blend can be well served by the addition of others’ ideas and perspectives. I’m hopeful for the additional tones, notes and flavors that they may bring.
I love the idea of blend in social situations where some people may do more than their share of contributing. I’m constantly amazed and intrigued when someone contributes that usually doesn’t and how much more “complete” the experience or event becomes. It’s not just in ideas but personalities or communication from all that might have a more balanced result!
Nicely done Tim. Well written and definitely worth pondering.
Love this post, Tim! BLEND is a wonderful word! Another b-word that I thought of and has been really important to me and my family lately is…BELONG as we re-learn how to navigate life since returning to the Midwest, life without parents and life in this time of Covid. How/where do we belong now?🤔(I have to remind myself that we belong to each other and now we must keep in mind that we’re a BLEND of where we were, where we are and where we’re going.)
Thank you, Tim, for sharing, and always inviting and including others in the conversation, which allows us to feel like we belong. Happy New Year!❤️🎉
Nicely done, my friend.
One might also argue that balance or blending is an element of ultimate success.
You have a way with words spoken and written. Thank you for sharing. Good words to ponder at the beginning of a New year. I am navigating being sandwiched between my adult kids and my parents. I have been thinking about balance in this context. Thank you for sharing.