Balance

Balance: When opposing forces harmonize. It sounds so simple—yet we all spend considerable time seeking balance in nearly all aspects of our lives.

In Nicaragua, it has been fascinating watching various displays of balance. Women heading for the Mercado can balance large baskets on their heads and walk down a street in crowded spaces with an ease and gracefulness that is majestic to watch. Families of four all ride on the same standard bicycle and you can see that they all have their sense of both their individual balance and the overall need for collective balance to keep the bicycle upright. Nicaraguans effortlessly take a siesta in a hammock as if they were born in one. People can stand on the chicken buses (old US and Costa Rica school buses) without holding on, while the buses start and stop and weave through traffic. Reading Nicaraguan poet laureate Ruben Dario’s prose has a cantor and a certain balance that you can simply feel from the words.

Thinking toward Yosemite National Park, accomplished climber Dean Potter earlier this year visited the Yosemite El Portal School to spend time with the students in navigating slack lines. The timing coincided with Dean being featured in National Geographic (May 2011), where there are several crazy pictures of him, one acrobatically climbing an inverted wall below Glacier Point without a rope, and the other walking a slack line over the top of Yosemite Falls. I have also watched his films with interest as he walks a slack line across the top of Yosemite Falls or across the void between Yosemite Falls and Broken Arrow. You can see his incredible focus and can almost imagine the feeling of floating in space that he must feel as he keeps himself balanced across these death defying walks.

As I watched Dean explain and show the students balance, I was struck by the elegance of his balance and watching him stand on a one-inch slack line and slowly and gracefully walk down the line. If you have not walked a slack line, try it! It is both challenging and difficult and it takes tremendous practice. For many years climbers in Yosemite and other places, during their down time between climbs or “projects” as they call them, have taken chains and webbing and challenged each other to various tricks, all involving balance. There is a great photo of legendary climber Chuck Pratt in Yosemite in the Sixties acrobatically walking a fence at the top of Nevada Falls--while juggling. I am guessing this balance comes clearly into focus when gripping a granite wall a thousand feet above the ground.

Balance enters our daily lives in various ways. We all balance the checking book; we seek to find the right balance between our professional and personal parts of our day; and all daily activities require physiological balance to avoid injury. The President and Congress are now struggling to address our nation’s debt and seek balance in the federal checkbook. In resources management, water resources managers have a “water balance” and spend their days working to achieve that balance. We have a highly sophisticated and productive capacity to produce food, yet there are many places in the world suffering famine making our world out of balance with respect to basic sustenance. In our National Parks, natural resources managers strive to find the right balance between the landscape and the people that want to enjoy its splendor.  

In thinking about balance in this special place called Nicaragua, it appears there are few excesses that tug at people and seek to take away from their innate equilibrium. We are learning by watching. Largely driven by economics, but also a part of the culture and a function of limited resources, people only consume what is truly necessary for the day, whether it is water, food, electricity or gasoline to drive to the next town. Very different!

Posted by David