Balancing on a tightrope

 

This photo is a symbol of balance. Here’s this guy on a tightrope, about 5000 feet above Yosemite valley. He can look down on Half Dome. Yes, he’s wearing equipment to save him if he falls off the wire, but he looks relaxed and calm as he moves from the face of one cliff to a neighboring cliff about 30 yards away.

The art of living a balanced life is a little bit like walking a tightrope. If we have learned the art, we walk calmly and beautifully in situations that would be scary for others, even unwise to venture into. If we have not learned the art, the feeling of walking a tightrope is a an anxious sense that we face unwelcome consequences if we do not find the golden mean between extremes and go a little too far to the left or the right. Some of us have learned the art of living. The rest of us have moments or longer stretches of time of sustaining that beautiful balance, but at other times we struggle.

I would love to know how have you learned the art of balanced living. Or what do you to develop this art? Or please describe what it is like when you are living in this balanced way. What do you observe in others who succeed at this? How did Jesus do it? How does he help us? What teachings in The Urantia Book are especially helpful? The questions immediately open up an enormous territory for inquiry and conversation.

I have a couple things to offer on the topic. The first quote is full of hope.

^{100:7.1 (1101.5)} Although the average mortal of Urantia cannot hope to attain the high perfection of character which Jesus of Nazareth acquired while sojourning in the flesh, it is altogether possible for every mortal believer to develop a strong and unified personality along the perfected lines of the Jesus personality. The unique feature of the Master’s personality was not so much its perfection as its symmetry, its exquisite and balanced unification.

Here’s my answer; this is what I’m striving for. Living a balanced life begins with being spiritually centered. Only on that basis can we engage fully in all of life’s essential activities, and discern when enough is enough.

One guide to balanced living that is especially important to me is the philosophy of living sketched at the end of Paper 2. Here is one sentence drawn from that sketch.

^{2:7.11 (43.4)} Health, sanity, and happiness are integrations of truth, beauty, and goodness as they are blended in human experience.

Rather than going into details, I will simply offer to each of you my a book, titled Living in Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. I append the first part of the book, so you can see if you want to read the whole thing (even at a snail’s pace, which is the best for absorbing it anyway). Because it is a philosophy book, and an academic book, even though it was written for the general reader, experience shows that the writing is too dense for the general reader. Here’s a .pdf that you can download of the front part of the book. If you like what you see and would welcome a copy from me, please write to me. You may reach me at  UBProjectsJHW@gmail.com. It will be my pleasure to contribute, in some way, to your adventure in balanced living.

For the 6-minute video . . . or the audio file

 

Image address

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/80/Taft_Point%2C_Yosemite_National_Park%2C_California%2C_U.S.jpg/1600px-Taft_Point%2C_Yosemite_National_Park%2C_California%2C_U.S.jpg

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