The Beauty of Being Imbalanced

Is being balanced boring?

People talk a lot about being balanced, the need to be balanced, that balance is the thing to go for.

But what is the dark side of being balanced?

Maybe all this balance rounds off the sharp edges of a person’s character, turning the unique and sometimes disturbing shapes of who a person is into sweet, pleasing circles, like a pack of Trebor soft mints.

So what about being imbalanced? It has obvious drawbacks, but what about the hidden good in being imbalanced?

If each person is a unique expression of a wild and dangerous cosmos, doesn’t it make more sense to lean into one’s weirdness, or the thing in us that makes each of us different?

Bet we’d have more geniuses in the culture if we did that.

Interestingly, the old idea of a genius was that of a guardian spirit that watches over you from birth - a being that has your best interests at heart. A lot of history sits between us and that way of thinking, so to make an idea like that palatable for secular humanism, I have say something like the old idea of genius imaginatively personifies that part of us that knows what we like and what we don’t, what we’re drawn to and what we’re not, so that we have the capacity to chose one way in life and not another, or to have a gut feeling when something doesn’t feel right.

Here are some iconic examples of admirable imbalance.

Michael Jordan is excessively competitive. Da Vinci was excessively inventive. Leonora Carrington was excessively imaginative. All of them leaned into who they were, and were beautifully unbalanced individuals.

There's more to say on this, but for now let me ask you a couple of questions. Who do you admire who is gloriously imbalanced? What aspect of yourself would you be interested in amplifying to the point of imbalance?

Or maybe you disagree with this whole premise, or have complimentary ideas.

Either way, leave a comment. I’m interested to know.