All across the country and around the world, things are speeding up.
It’s nearly summer. The planet is warming up, budding and blossoming. The season of alphabetically-named tropical storms is brewing.
For better or for worse, we are in various stages of emerging from our collective long pause with an overlay of mass protests – long-simmering discontent bursting forth in a deluge of defiance, anger, hope and a persistent demand for change we cannot just feel, but see.
“The fierce urgency of now,” as Dr. King put it.
Those of us working from home are seeing the days becoming longer, stretching into the weekends, and more packed with calls, emails and Zoom meetings. Phase 1 is finally beginning in New York City, with 400,000 workers returning to their places of business. Those driving essential services all along are also seeing an increase in their workloads as the nation re-ignites our economy.
Although it feels uniquely imperative for the heightened times we find ourselves, this is the natural rhythm of polarity. In everything there is a back and forth, a swing of ebb and crest, a crowning and receding.
After months of sequestration, we are resurfacing. And with that, there is a feeling of needing to make up for lost time, a fear of missing out on whatever advantage we could be getting before everything comes back online again.
Underneath this push is a sense of desperation.
Just look at how many people, organizations and businesses are flooding our in-boxes with new programs, services, events and products all clamoring for us to participate, buy, or make time on our schedules to attend and view.
[We’ll save a conversation about the anti-racism solidarity/confessional emails every company is feeling the need to send for another time.]
But there are not enough hours in the day, and we do not have enough attention span to absorb it all. In fact, many of us are on technological overload, already burned out on screens and phones, texting, typing and talking.
I know I am.
The thing about chaos is that while things are destroyed and swept aside, room is made for new things to be born and step into view. The dissolution of one way of doing or being gives birth to fresh ways of doing and being. Destruction is also transformation.
So I’ve begun to pay closer attention to this Principle of Polarity that is inherent in life on this planet. And I have found support in understanding and applying it to my everyday existence.
Energy swings back and forth in a pendulum-like movement. We can find references to this all around us – between peaks and valleys, in the movement of the ocean, and from darkest night to brightest day.
We find it in the ancient Chinese philosophy of Yin and Yang, a concept of dualism describing how seemingly opposite or contrary forces are actually complementary.
In the Christian Bible, the Book of Ecclesiastes Chapter 3 teaches that there is, “A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted…” and goes on for several verses to give examples of this principle of polarity.
This pendulum movement reaches the extremes of its arc by passing through the middle. The middle is like a fulcrum, a balancing point when the momentum is slowed down and equidistant from either edge.
As we experience the thresholds of life’s occurrences – lack and abundance, love and hate, fear and courage, doubt and faith, war and peace, sickness and health, working and resting, having and losing, giving and receiving, living and dying – our work is to strive for the best balancing point between the high points of that swing.
We don’t have to get it all done now. We honor our bio-rhythms, emotional and mental stability when we recognize that what we can get done is enough when done with, focus, patience, presence of mind and respect for our reserves of energy and wellbeing.
Those verses in Ecclesiastes begin with the line “To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven.”
The Tao reminds us that there is a natural order underlying the substance and activity of Yin and Yang and inside the fullness of one is the seed of the other waiting to evolve.
Now that we are facing a present that is being redefined daily, let us measure the desire to move hastily with a sense of our own natural cadence, confident in the universal order always at work, whether we can see it or not.
