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The Never-Ending Balance

It’s less work to see the world in black and white, but as I get older, I find myself more comfortable in the gray. I’m not talking about the gray that comes with age and that Baby Boomers spend a lot of money removing at the hair salon—although I’m lucky to have inherited my grandmother’s genes. She didn’t go gray until her 70s and I haven’t started the process either, despite plenty of good reasons.

I’m talking about the space between opposites, getting comfortable in the imperfect, the messy, the ambiguous, the complicated. I’m talking about the positive aspects of aging and finally learning the lessons that were always there, patiently waiting to be learned.

I started to think about all this while recently taking a walk and breathing a sigh of relief that spring had finally sprung. I looked back at a column I wrote at about the same time last year in which I marveled at the sheer beauty of spring bursting into bloom so dramatically after the cold and dreary winter.

This year was not nearly so linear and predictable. We had many fits and starts—flowers tricked into blooming and back into retreating with cold blasts of winter’s return. But, like every year, spring has finally arrived for good—at least until summer. It’s all about seeing the bigger picture.

My husband and I were talking about the need to find balance in our lives the other day, which is something we’re always working on, tweaking, when things start to go off kilter, and is something I’ve also finally come to accept will never be perfectly achieved and will always need to be re-balanced, like the tires on my car.

I loved what he said about polarity: That by its very definition it’s two opposites (positive and negative charges) magnetically drawn together and therefore unable to be separated. The yin and the yang, the good and the bad, as all part of the greater scheme, making it easier to accept that life will always contain both, rather than fighting that inevitability.

My parents were always surprised and distraught when things didn’t go as they expected when I was growing up. They would get so consumed when a monkey wrench was thrown into their best-laid plans, taking it personally and getting angry with whomever or whatever they perceived caused such a major inconvenience. You only know what you know at the time and it took me many years to realize the world didn’t revolve around me and my problems. It felt better to let go of the blame, of being a victim.

After several big, sudden, terrible losses in my life, I spent a lot of time waiting for something else to fall out of the sky, the next shoe to drop, but the years have taught me perspective. I can see the sense that came out of the senseless, the human spirit—my own spirit—to eventually rise up and move on, to learn from experiences both good and bad and everything in between.

I also learned that when something starts to spiral downward, it doesn’t necessarily continue in that pattern. In November I wrote a column about our dog, Penny Lane, who became suddenly, critically ill. We all expected at the very most she would survive a few more months. She is still with us, going strong, her bark back, greeting visitors with a wagging tail. Sometime miracles do happen. Every hour in every day I think about how lucky we are that she is still with us, while also acknowledging that there are no guarantees about tomorrow.

As I get older I find I am both more tolerant and less tolerant at the same time. And that it makes sense.

I am more forgiving of people I care about for their quirks and transgressions. I am much better at accepting that we are all human—including myself—and imperfect.

On the other hand, I am less accepting of people whose behavior is rude and mean-spirited and not self-reflective—people who are unable or unwilling to apologize when they’ve harmed someone else.

I am much more discerning about whom I choose to spend my time with—people who can love and laugh; people who are resilient and willing to take risks; people who try, even when it’s so ridiculously hard, to see the glass as half full. One of my dearest girlfriends fits that description. We call ourselves “sisters by choice.”

So as I begin to accept the stunning truth there is less time ahead than there is now behind me (where, oh where did it go?), I also learn to go more with the flow, to stop just seeing what appears so clearly black and white at first glance and to not only embrace the gray, but the astonishing kaleidoscope of color in between.

Amy J. Barry is a Baby Boomer, who lives in Stony Creek with her husband and assorted pets. She writes theater reviews for Shore Publishing newspapers and is an expressive arts educator. Contact her at amy.j.barry@snet.net or www.aimwrite-ct.net.