I had to walk a tight rope this week. Not a figurative tight rope. An actual tight rope made of wire. It was two feet off the ground, but at this age, falling two feet could hurt. I didn’t do this completely unassisted. I had some support since it was a team building thing, but I will say that I did most of my tight rope walking with very minimal assistance. I really feel like if I had had some time on my own, just a few minutes really, I would have been dancing along that rope with zero assistance. It is quite possible that I could have a second career as a tight rope walker for a circus. I shouldn’t be surprised with this ability. I dominated the balance beam during my short gymnastics stint, but a wire is very different from a balance beam.

Wires move.

The wire vibrates and bounces with each step, even while attempting to stand still. The tension and strain from trying to hold yourself steady flows right down to the wire, which then begins to vibrate from side to side. You body turns rigid in effort to stop the wire from moving, but this causes the wire to move even more. At least, this was my experience. The harder I worked to get the wire to be still, the more the wire moved. The wire would only stop moving if I paused to take a moment to focus solely on my breath and release the tension from body. Balance is not rigid. It is fluid. You have to be able to sway and trust me when I tell you that this fluidity counter acts the movement of the wire. This doesn’t mean that muscles aren’t engaged and you are all loosey goosey. I could feel every single one of my core muscles tighten up to help me balance. I guess it’s more of dancer like movement and less of a hold it together by brut force kind of thing.

The physical act of wire walking is the most obvious metaphor for life.

It is so painstakingly obvious that I am kicking myself for all of the many many many times I tried to hold shit together by shear force. And I know this from my practice on my mat. I know that when I pause to focus on my breath, when I allow myself to sway and bend, everything that is supposed to fall into place, falls into place. That’s the key: Everything that is supposed to fall into place, falls into place. This means dropping any ideas of controlling everything to fall into place. Instead I need to focus on the things that I can control. Recently, I wrote up a list of reasons of why I am unhappy. It turned out to be a very short list. So I followed that list with a list of ways I could fix the unhappy list. What I realize about the things on the unhappy list is that they all consist of things that I can’t really control, like other people’s behavior. The solutions to those things are to control my reactions. Some of that means speaking up more and some of it means putting less effort into things. I have stopped trying so hard to make the wire stop vibrating.

This is what I’m thankful for today.