Thrown Off Course In A Starbuck Moment

From Bookworm's Writing Workshop...thanks for the writing time, BW!

I find myself searching for balance in an unbalanced world.

It happened this morning. Exiting Starbucks, the man in front of me flung open the glass door and slammed it unintentionally into the face of a man passing by. I saw it coming and gasped, spilling my cup scalding onto my hand. The man who walked into the door smacked into it face first, a split in his forehead spurting a tablespoon of blood upon impact. In that silent moment when everyone paused and held a shocked breath, I expected to hear the injured man shout obscenities or at least a “What the hell?” Instead, his apologies spilled forth like the blood from his wound.

Meanwhile, the man who’d pushed open the door smiled innocuously and said nothing. He walked off while I ran back into the shop for napkins as a compress for the bleeding man. There was no apology from the door opener, no sense of worry, not even a helping hand – just a smile, perhaps even a giggle, and then off to his day, a bloody man in his wake.

In the parking lot, I watched another man drive off with his recently purchased vente double pump on the roof of his car. I thought to stop him, but I was still lost in thinking about the man with the gashed forehead. In the end, the driver didn’t hear the thump of the cup or the sloppy spill on his bumper and sped down the avenue oblivious, in so much of a hurry it seemed as if he’d forgotten he’d stopped to get coffee at all.

Later, the drive on the freeway to my appointment was about counting red-tailed hawks perched in hunger on the light posts. Twelve in total, watching for rats, I imagine – unbalanced predators doing their best to dent the burgeoning populations of unbalanced prey. The president was on the radio using words I could not hear and I was thinking about work and how I want to leap and change and manifest myself into something different, something balanced.

Yin and yang, and in these troubled times I feel caught in between.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said that he “cracked up” when he could no longer hold two opposing thoughts in his head at the same time – to be hopeful, for instance in the time of hopelessness.

I feel neither hope nor hopelessness nor do I feel as if I am cracking up. Cracking up, I now think, is more a matter of feeling one without feeling the other – the heavy weight of hopelessness flinging the scale vertically or the equally profound import of hope catapulted by the reality of despair. Balance is quantified in dosages. A bloody forehead and famished hawk. A bouncing coffee cup and a long, fast drive on the freeway.

I have often wondered, at what point did the Romans know their empire was crumbling? At what point did they throw up their hands and say, “Well, folks, it was a nice ride but this isn’t working anymore? We are too far out of balance, we must begin again.”

I know it’s not that simple, that change does not walk in the plain clothes of a monk. Change is layered, like a beggar dressed in pants on top of pants, shirts on top of shirts, wool coats covered by wool coats. Good happens. Bad does too, and we mark our days with what went well and what didn’t, with the memories of a smile or the flame of someone’s anger. The scale tips, first in this direction and then in that and we are forever trying to hold out our arms and balance it all as skillfully as we can.

I find myself counting the weights placed on either side of the scale, observing, speculating, determining if indeed one disaster here can outweigh a thousand little pleasures over there. Can laughter compensate for grief? Can a compliment counteract an insult? Can a drop of compassion stop internal bleeding?

I want to believe it can. I want to believe that balance is achieved not by stacking the weights in our favor, but by relishing the gentle nuances – the rise and fall, the delicate swing at the fulcrum.

There is the man with the bloody forehead apologizing for something that happened to him, something he could not control. And there is the man who walked away, inattentive and seemingly pleased with the world at that moment. We can live in those extremes or we can live in the middle, swaying as if on a ship, our legs firmly planted on the deck piloting this stormy sea of an unbalanced world.