Pandemic Diary Day….?  I’m not sure what day.  Like most people, I have a lot of time to think these days.  The thoughts are not always deep and insightful.  Often the thoughts are things like “What the heck is the tune that they use for the Sponge Daddy jingle?  I know that tune, but just can’t place it.”  I am embarrassed at how many times and ways I’ve tried to Google that.  My thoughts are also along the lines of “Why on earth do people throw such random trash out of their car windows?”  These thoughts happen on my walks around the neighborhood.  Or when I accompany Trish on one of her trash pickup activities along the roadway.  What IS it about those 5 Hour Energy shots that must make people immediately toss them out of the car window when they drink them?  And don’t get me started on why people think cigarette butts are biodegradable.  But I digress.

Sometimes I do start stitching together thoughts that end up in an essay and lately I’ve been thinking a lot about “balance”.  The visual I chose to use with this essay is not a set of scales, like you often see with a blinded Justice (anyone else have an issue with Justice being blinded, like someone is trying to pull something over on her?).  The scales imply that balance is a static activity.  You load two opposing “things” on the different pans and wait for the scales to steady.  Then you can see which one is obviously “better”.  That works well if you are measuring something physical like a weight.  It’s not a very helpful analogy when you are weighing actions and consequences.  I’ve written about choices and consequences before.  Today I want to talk about how to balance competing priorities/needs/wants.  And to do that, I need to use the visual of a pendulum.

Achieving balance, in my mind, does not result in a static state.  We’d love it to be static.  “I am finally in balance!” you think on a good day.  Until it’s not a good day anymore.  Balance is a dynamic process, constantly swinging through that elusive balance point but never staying there.  My goal is to try to keep the amplitude of the swings as low as possible.  I like things to be steady.  I do have a tendency to motion sickness after all.  Have you noticed that there are others that seem to like to swing that pendulum as far to the extremes as possible?  They love those swings.  Well, bless their hearts.  (Anyone from the South knows what I mean by that.)

“Balance” in this context can take many forms.  There is balance in your diet; in your emotions; in your relationships; in your problem solving process.  The difficulty in achieving a sense of balance is accepting, as Brene Brown says, that you can carry two competing truths in your mind and not have to choose between them.  Let me give you an example.  We have previously established that Trish has no spatial skills when it comes to loading dishes in a dishwasher.  I will open a nearly empty dishwasher to find one small bowl—ONE bowl—sitting smack in the middle of the bottom rack.  Usually lying diagonally across a couple of rows of spokes.  This trait, to me, is not a positive one.  I do not like it.  But do I throw up my arms, scream something about closest-packed-configurations and go running out the door?  No.  Well, not yet.  And that’s because she has a few other characteristics that I find quite charming and lovable and, on balance, I can tolerate (and rearrange) the dishwasher.  That’s an easy one to balance.  The negative issue is of much less importance to me than the positive issues so I can reconcile the dishwasher thing.

More tricky can be balancing competing priorities of different constituencies, like family members or work colleagues.  I remember a scene from The Wonder Years, with the narrator talking about his parents and how they negotiated differing preferences.  The example was tile for the kitchen floor.  He didn’t like her choice; she didn’t like his; so, they compromised on one neither of them particularly liked.  Or there is the example of balancing spending needs in a business against profitability.  You need both, but not one to the exclusion of the other.  Or, as noted above, balancing your diet.  If you swing the pendulum too far to the “good but tasteless” side, you risk swinging the other way too far to “bad but delicious.”  Trust me.  I have done this experiment.  And so have you, I would guess.

Here’s one that’s a bit tougher and that we are all struggling with right now.  We’ve got this crazy virus circulating that we don’t know a lot about yet.  We know that it seems to be highly contagious and that people can spread the virus without showing symptoms.  We know that a majority of people who pick up this virus will show no or mild sickness but that a small percentage have a horrid reaction, end up in the hospital, may be on a ventilator for weeks, and many die.  Our first very valid reaction as we were learning about the virus was “Ack!  Everyone stay HOME!”  In parts of the country, hospitals were becoming overwhelmed and we had no treatment, no vaccine, no way to stop this thing besides staying away from each other.  But then, people started suffering in other existential ways:  millions have lost their jobs, we have lost trillions in economic value, and we’re facing an economic recession that may take a long, long time to recover.  We’ve got to get people back to work and start shopping again!  (Remember, our economy is 70% consumer spending.)  How do we balance those two very valid, very serious conditions that are in opposition?

This, people, is when we can hold two competing truths in our minds.  We can respect the need to minimize spread of this disease as well as the need to open our economy.  What I worry about are the pendulum swingers—the ones who see “opening” as meaning back to the pre-virus norm of packed beaches, restaurants, theaters, ball parks with no restraints.  I also worry about the ones who say we must stay in total lockdown until there are no more cases of this virus anywhere.  Neither are constructive.  It is not an affront on your liberty to wear a damn facemask when you go out.  Nor is it an attack on the Second Amendment to limit seating in a restaurant.  Nor are we all going to die if golf courses open up or I go get my hair cut (as long as we take reasonable precautions like said facemasks and minimizing contact).  We just need to be smart about how we “reopen”.  Nudge the pendulum toward the balance point and be ready to nudge it back the other way if needed.  Recognize you will not get everything you want but neither will others who are pushing the pendulum in the other direction.  And above all, pray that we can keep our hospitals from being overwhelmed so that if you or someone you love is in the unfortunate small percentage that need them, our healthcare workers will be there and ready.

Our goal is to constantly strive for balance, recognizing that you will often approach balance and even be “in” balance for brief moments, but more often you will be looking for data to help you ease toward it.  It’s about holding those two opposing truths in your mind and knowing that it is ok to, say, like a particular political candidate enough to vote for them but not agree with everything they say or have done.  Similarly, you can find something you like and respect about someone you don’t particular enjoy working or spending much time with.  It’s not hypocritical.  It’s pragmatic and balanced.  And you can love someone dearly and still curse softly at how the dishwasher is loaded.