Do you remember as a child sitting on the end of a teeter-totter, your feet dangling loosely below you, feeling weightless and perfectly still for one fleeting moment?

Here, you were balanced.

“The Matrix is like a bowl of cereal. I’m like the milk.” – Keanu Reeves

Now… do you remember four seconds later? How, fueled with desperation you began kicking, bouncing, pushing and pulling to get moving again – longing to experience the exhilaration of extremes.

Here, giggling excitedly, pitching yourself to and fro, you were basking in the glory of imbalance.

Forget finding balance. Focus on embracing imbalance. Moving from high to low and back again is the essence of life. That is living. Sitting idle, although comfortable, is fucking boring.

I remember sitting on a beach one day with a beautiful girl, smelling the salt air, watching seagulls circle above and listening to some honest words I really, really didn’t want to hear. After stating my case there wasn’t anything left to say, so I slowly turned away, smiled the smile of a best friend attending an Irish wake and confessed, “Wow, this fucking hurts. I’m really living right now.”

We are all searching for ways to bring balance to our lives. To feel more content and less agitated. To think less and feel more. To widen our awareness, connect to others and become more grounded and whole.

But ultimately, there’s only one thing that’s guaranteed to bring you into balance and it isn’t your friends, family, job, passion, children, sex, money, love or therapist – it’s simply your ability to keep perspective. It’s perspective that serves as our counterweight to imbalance, returning our emotions to center when it feels as if everything is about to slide off one end of the table.

Just cus’ you get crushed doesn’t mean you’re ruined. And just cus’ your legs have grown too long to dangle freely beneath a teeter-totter doesn’t mean you should stop kicking, bouncing, pushing and pulling in hopes of soaring to new heights and delving to new lows, because that’s when you know you’re really living.