The last few months out of covid life (before the Delta showed up) had been good with the all too common challenge of finding balance between doing too much and setting time aside for rest.
It’s as though life is synonymous with the ongoing practice of trying to maintain balance.
Speaking of balance and working to stay centered, I’ve been making more of an effort to finish the books I’ve started. The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer has a chapter called ‘the secret of the middle way.’ In this chapter, he introduces the spiritual teaching of the Tao te Ching where Lao-tzu discusses ‘the Tao’ which translated means ‘the Way’.
Singer says ‘The Tao is so subtle that one can only talk around its edges, but never actually touch it.’ The Tao te Ching lays down the principles of life as the balance of the yin and the yang, the feminine and the masculine, the dark and the light.
In this classic Chinese text, the Laozi explains that Tao is the underlying natural order of the Universe with its essence being too difficult to limit. Tao is not a name for a thing, but rather a practice that is lived, experienced and felt. Much like Life.
A metaphor to better understand the Tao is the pendulum which swings from one extreme to the other. The extremes are: yin and yang, expansion and contraction, non-doing and doing.
Singer describes ‘Everything has two extremes. Everything has gradations of the pendulum swing. If you go to the extremes, you cannot survive. If you pull a pendulum out one way, it will swing back just that far the other way. The Tao is in the middle. It’s the place where there is no energy pushing in either direction. The Way is the place in which the forces balance quietly. And indeed, unless you go out of the Way, they will tend to stay in peaceful harmony.’
‘If you want to understand the Tao, you must take a closer look at what lies between the two extremes because neither extreme can last. The pendulum can only remain at one of its outermost positions for a moment, but how long can a pendulum stay at rest? It can remain there forever because there are no forces moving it out of balance. That is the Tao. It is the center. Everything has its own balance point because everything has its yin and yang. It is the harmony of all these balance points, woven together that forms the Tao.’
What Tao is Not
A few months ago, I went to see Roadrunner in a small historic theater by myself. Even though I never really watched Anthony Bourdain’s shows, there was something about him that I found very intriguing. A sort of je ne sais quoi that made him stand out.
When I heard the news of his death on the radio, I was in my car in the parking lot of Bed Bath and Beyond after having just recently moved from Austin back to Portland. My initial reaction was feeling my heart sink further into my chest while my eyes welled up with tears. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This man with one of the coolest jobs in the world took his own life! But why?
Eventually I came to better understand that Anthony Michael Bourdain was a person who suffered from mental health issues for what may have been the entirety of his life. Call it depression, call it anxiety, call it ADHD, call it addiction - the man suffered from living in extremes.
While watching the film that documents chunks of his life, you see Bourdain live with a motivating force to change his internal state by changing his external state. First a dedicated chef, then a voracious author wanting to share his experiences in the kitchen, to trotting the globe for connection and communion through food with people from all kinds of different cultures and socio-economic backgrounds.
This opportunity to see and experience the world in this unique way came with a price that ultimately led to his feeling indignant of what was happening to the strangers he met on his journeys meanwhile feeling a growing disconnection from the people closest to him back home.
I don’t know enough to write with certainty about what truly happened inside of Anthony Bourdain. What I will say based on my intuition is that he seemed to have suffered greatly from his inability to find balance and experience a sense of peace from riding in the middle.
His tendency towards addiction provoked him to seek the push and pull at all times because without it, he felt less alive and without purpose. In his later years just before passing, he inquired for people to share what they felt was the purpose to life. One of the people he asks this question to responds with ‘the purpose of my life is to accept the love that people in my life want to give me’.
Full Circle
Learning more about Tao has brought me to the conclusion that when you suffer from mental health issues, the desire to find balance and live balanced can often times feel like a huge unattainable feat.
Throw addictions into the mix to help soothe the sad and satiate the anger, and you soon discover that what you are trying to numb yourself from, is exactly what you need to feel in order to heal. The only way is through. There are no short cuts, no detours.
Tao teaches us the art of quiet balance. The freedom of the middle way where there is no push or pull, no grasping or aversion, no seeking or resistance. I like to think of Tao as the practice of savoring the present, noticing the spaces between the thoughts and the experiences. The quiet stillness that brings us back into balance with our center, our heart – where we find courage to live with acceptance of what is rather than what we desire it to be.
A good way to remind yourself to live in this balanced harmony is to remember the pendulum and when you notice yourself struggling, stop and say out loud ‘Thank you Spirit for this pause. My intention is to feel my center and live from this place so that I can know ‘the Way’.