Balance

I have recently been re-teaching myself how to swim, according to the sensible precepts of veteran swimmer Terry Laughlin. In his Total Immersion program, designed for the four basic swimming strokes (freestyle, backstroke, breaststroke, and butterfly), Laughlin emphasizes the preeminent need for balance in the water. And this aquatic balance is very different from our land-based sense of balance.

As land-based creatures, humans depend on centering their feet directly below their bodies' center-of-gravity in order to stand, walk, or perform any variation thereof. We have fluids in the semicircular canals of the inner ear to aid us in this. In water, though, this instinct hampers the kind of fish-like balance that we need to move efficiently there. A balanced position for swimming has the head, arms, and upper torso on one side, with the hips and legs on the other: a horizontal, not vertical position. Swimming education has traditionally ignored this need for water-balance, an omission contributing to an almost universal difficulty among the population with swimming. What I'm doing is unlearning bad swimming habits and beginning anew from scratch, working to establish within myself a new "instinct" for water balance.

The concept of balance can be allegorically extended to life in general, although with this it is necessary to establish some parameters. And since each of us, with our own individual natures, emphasizes different parameters according to our own values and priorities, there is no truly objective guide for "balance" in life. So I can only speak for myself and let others speak for themselves.

For me, balance is composed of integrating the good things in my life together to the point where nothing worthwhile suffers at the hands of excess attention to something else. And like with swimming, it can be quite a struggle to unlearn bad habits that create imbalance. Also, over time the parameters that I am trying to balance may themselves change, often causing a "life-direction" shift.