Introducing Balance

I have a confession. I neither love or hate Marmite. I’m just ok about it. Some days I’m in a Marmite kind of mood, and other days I’m not. Is that OK? I feel like I need to make a decision, nail my colours to the mast, come down on one side of the fence. But I’m not ready to make that kind of statement. Maybe that makes me hard to understand. Or just hard to cater for when I go for to someone’s house for breakfast? I can imagine my friends having all these late night quandaries: ‘Do we put out the marmite or not in the morning?’ 

We seem to love certainty, absolutes, extremes of views. It helps us to pin point someone into one of our boxes; Labour or Conservative; City person or Country person; pineapple should be on pizza or pineapple should be nowhere near pizza. We’re less comfortable with ambiguity. 

Our attempts to understand ourselves might have a similar trend.

Are we the kind of person who believes that or this?

Are we the kind of person who can or can’t do that thing?

Do we hang out with people from that ‘tribe’ or this ‘tribe’?

Over recent years, we have seen people’s views polarise more and more.

Technology (social media, search engines, music apps) gives us back what we ‘put in’, serving to entrench us, immerse us, further reinforce whatever views, interests, preferences we might hint we already have, all in the interests of serving the users unique preferences. This has some benefits, but it primarily serves the advertisers who use this data to target their messages to what they see as their key demographic. 

This month, we want to think about balance - the importance of getting things in the ‘right’ proportions for our health and wellbeing.

Balance requires us to recognise extremes and find the right proportion for us; work/rest/play, structure/spontaneity, time with others/time alone, giving/receiving are perhaps just some of things we need to find balance in. None of this will happen when we prize absolutes, extremes, certainty. Balance comes when we accept that there can be value in many different things. It’s a time, place and proportion thing rather than a right or wrong thing. It’s possible to have too much of a good thing, and not having enough of some things can leave us feeling incomplete.  

Now back to Marmite. Once when I was younger, I made my younger brother marmite on toast. In my generosity, I spread it on thick; thick like you might spread chocolate spread on to toast. He graciously ate it, and later came out in a rather nasty rash. He was understandably put off Marmite forever! I wonder what this says about the importance of balance? I wonder where the ‘lesson’ is in this event? I wonder what might have prevented his life time aversion to Marmite?   

TRY THIS …

Take some time to ask yourself these questions

• Why is balance important?

• What happens when people don’t find balance?

• What prevents people finding balance in their lives?

• What extremes are acceptable? Not acceptable?  

Why not write down some thoughts and come back to them during the course of this month?

Article by Ben Harper. You can carry on the conversation with Ben on his Twitter @wellbeingteach.