The Divine Balance

“I am running out of time! Only if I had a bit more time! …” Two sentences we hear or repeat all the time!

The perceived rarity of time drives us into an eternal search for effectiveness and efficiency to compensate for it. I will call this inseparable couple, effectency.

“Do I look good? Am I elegant? Am I beautiful? …” Thoughts that cross our minds at least once a day and for some every time they see their reflection in a mirror or in the eyes of another person.

Behaving with effectency and striving to look or be beautiful are among the most influential factors on the pace and style of our lives, on who we are or become, on the type of interactions we have with other people, and on the discussions that go on within our own brain.

Our life is a constant search, rarely successful, to find the right balance between beauty and effectency. Here are two examples that illustrate simply this observation:

1. A successful businessman, after 10-12 hours of work every day, comes home exhausted with one thing on his mind, how to spend every bit of his time with his kids before they go to sleep and then some quality time with his wife before he falls apart from tiredness. There is no doubt that he uses every moment with his kids and wife with the utmost effectency. But this man is missing leisure time, where he can play with his kids without counting the minutes, where he can enjoy a lazy dinner with his family without thinking about the work left to do, and where he can spend long hours with his wife discussing many and any unimportant things without having the feeling of wasting time. What this man is missing in his life is the dominance of beauty! For beauty to happen in a meaningful way we need uncounted time, without the shadow of effectency hanging over! Beautiful moments need time to develop, emerge and be fully lived!

2. A professional basketball player always makes sure that every run he makes and every shot he takes are delivered with the elegance that his personality requires and the spectators expect. One evening, in a very competitive and close game, during money time, few seconds before the end of the last quarter, the opposite team was up by 1 point, his teammate intercepted the ball and passed it to him, he caught it and started running towards the basket, with the usual elegance expected from him. He made a beautiful layup, an artful move, but he missed the basket and his team lost! “Beauty 1 – Efffectency 0”. Maybe, if he cared a bit less about looks and style and went for the most effectent layup, without any acrobatics, then he would have made the shot and his team would have won! And maybe, if he had more time for beauty, his hand would have trembled less and he would have made the shot, while executing his beautiful move!

These two elementary examples express the unavoidable compromise and the continuous tension between beauty and effectency. The key question, to which many people are trying to find an answer, is: “when does beauty stop and effectency start, and when does effectency retreat and beauty take hold?” Answering this question right, more often than the other person, makes the whole difference between our success and our failure.

After meeting, knowing and experiencing thousands of people, we start to realize that, when it comes to beauty and effectency, humans can be placed in exactly three categories:

1. The Lucky, whose actions, without much effort or extensive planning, come across crowned with elegance and anchored in effectency. They are very few in this category, but they exist! These people have our indefectible admiration, often tainted with some envy and a bit of jealousy!

2. The Hopeless, no matter how hard they try, will always be missing beauty and effectency in their actions. Some relentlessly try and never succeed and their perseverance calls for our respect, even if this respect carries with it a deal of pity for their lack of talent. Others, who try a little and then stop trying, leaving behind them a trail of ugly and ineffectent actions, are at best irrelevant and at worst a real nuisance to society!

3. The Hopefuls, persevere with constant effort to find the appropriate balance. They succeed sometimes and fail other times. Their successes follow no pattern or rule and their failures are not due to one recurring reason. The two examples above illustrate precisely this category of people. Their life is a perpetual attempt to get near the divine balance of beauty and effectency, this divine balance that enabled the creation of the universe with its marvels and catastrophes, and its splendor and harshness.

To our surprise, the largest category of people is not the “hopefuls”, as most people would like to naturally believe, but the “hopeless”. The dominant ugliness of humans’ actions across the world is the best proof to this affirmation.

When we are part of “the lucky” we know it fairly early in our lives. If we don’t have that luck, then our best shot is to try hard to join the ranks of the “hopefuls” and avoid at all cost becoming a “hopeless”, some of us are born without a real choice! To that end we ought to ask ourselves two questions, which I constantly ask myself:

The first question is: are we really lacking time to reach that divine balance? At first our instinctive answer would be: yes! Of course time is the problem. But as we look deeper into ourselves, and ask our subjective ego to be honest with our objective intellect, the answer turns into: no! Time is not what we are lacking the most. We have plenty of time, but because we think it is free, we use it ineffectently and waste it. Consequently, we blame time for our inability to use it properly. It is similar to blaming a tree for producing fruits that are beyond our reach.

The second question that we need to answer is: do we have enough beauty in us, giving us the hope and the chance to strike a certain balance in few of our several attempts? The simple unfortunate truth is: no! Human beauty is a very rare thing, so rare that sometimes, we doubt its mere existence. The Lucky ones create beauty; the hopefuls search for it and the hopeless destroy it. As we all know, nature abhors void and quickly fills it with something else. The unbearable void created by the scarcity of human beauty is quickly filled by the “illusion of beauty”. This latter is everywhere, easy to create and easy to find. There is nothing wrong with the illusion of beauty in a world filled with countless illusions. There is nothing wrong with that at all, (too) many people are very satisfied with the way things are. The only thing wrong with the illusion of beauty is that few enlightened people immensely suffer from the lack of real beauty! But then again, what’s wrong with that?