My annual physical has a metaphysical angle. My general practitioner and I hold very different political perspectives. But I like him personally and respect him professionally, and in the course of my check-ups we often make jovial odd-couple small-talk about his missionary work and my feminist advocacy. Last month in his office, I asked for tips for bone health, and he suggested adding a Mobo board to my morning routine of yoga and hand-weights. I listened.
The Mobo board is a balancing tool designed, as the box says, to “Stabilize your Stance.” It’s like a circular landlubber’s surfboard with semi-circular rockers that snap onto the bottom. There’s a carved footprint on each side for placing one foot at a time with the big toe as the anchor, leaving the little toes to dangle through an open slot. Even the simplest moves are an exercise in humility, as you learn, quite literally, to “get a grip” so you can balance on the rockers. Slowly, you can work up to weight-shifting moves that teach you to find your footing in any circumstance. I’m still windmilling my arms with every move.
That struggle to find equilibrium in disorienting circumstances sends me back to my six-year-old self with a middle-ear infection that produced vertigo so sickening that I repeatedly tipped and crashed into the yellow-plaid wallpaper in our suburban Denver home. The cheerful, familiar lines of wallpaper would unexpectedly stretch like a fun-house mirror, as if suddenly I was riding ocean waves, careening into the outstretched arms of my terrified parents. After weeks of disorientation, a simple operation — tubes in the ears — gave me back my equilibrium.
Now it's our nation that's turbulent, unsteady, and no simple operation will fix us. So, I'm toggling between the nausea of political vertigo — maybe you are, too? — and the resolve to find my footing, one toe at a time. I feel myself panicking, sliding. It’s hard to get a grip.
I think of a recent yoga class at our local library, taught by an insightful young woman who once took my university classes. This time she was the guide, urging us to notice when we moved too fast through poses, reminding us that speed is a cheat to avoid the work of holding steady. “I know," she said, kinder and wiser than I'm sure I ever sounded in class, "It's hard to go slow.” I quoted her in my FaceTime with my 92-year-old father that evening, and he nodded, the half-moons of his bifocals winking on my screen, “Yeah, that's right,” he said, “Going slow forces you to balance.”
Many of us know the lie of achieving a “work-life balance.” Raise your hand if you’ve attended a professional conference in which an expert assures an audience of mostly women that if only we make better decisions about our time that we can live a life that doesn’t drive us crazy: “Practice saying no,” “Set boundaries,” “Ensure you have me-time.” As if the problem is us. But so often the problem can’t be fixed with one person putting their foot down, however firmly. As feminists have declared for decades, often personal problems require political solutions. For example, no shift in one person’s life will create society-wide affordable childcare that would shift our culture’s attitude about work and family life. The problem IS fixable. But creating a work-life balance will require many of us pulling together toward something better.
In 1982, when I was a high school sophomore, just waking up to the world’s injustices, my daily soundtrack of Pink Floyd was disrupted for a while by the experimental film, Koyaanisquatsi: Life out of Balance, with its mesmerizing, eerie music by Philip Glass. In the film, the scale of human destruction and potential to recover, captured in images rather than words, totally upended me. When my friends and I felt overwhelmed by the rottenness of the world, we’d crack one another up by mimicking the movie trailer’s droning voiceover, ”Koyaanisqatsiiiiiii.” That bleak inside joke – laughing at the darkness – reminded us that we still had power. One definition of that Hopi word, Koyaanisqatsi, is “a state of life that calls for another way of living.”
And here we are now, with a nation profoundly disoriented, recognizing that we can’t restore balance on our own. Like people rescuing one another from crashing through thin ice, we’re going to have to link arms, trust one another, and slowly find our footing together.
Music: Philip Glass - "Koyaanisqatsi"