Metronomy x Naima Bock x Joshua Idehen // With Balance
Post by Misha //
I struggle with the obsession with finding the right answer to everything. The one correct lens through which to evaluate life, by which to frame my and others’ actions. Not sure what gave me the idea that it would be desirable or even possible to find that – school, maybe. True or false questions. Standardized testing. More broadly, our cultural allergy to anything containing even a whiff of contradiction. Everywhere we turn someone advertising the existence of some magical answer that will eliminate once and for all the need for any more burning questions. There’s nothing we hate more than burning questions. Nothing we love more than extinguishing them.
Anyway, it’s debilitating, this obsession.
I received a piece of advice some years ago from one of those self-help Instagram memes (mortifying, I know – bear with me). The post was about the contradictions one often finds within movements. For instance: on the one hand, the need to create as broad a base of support as possible, even if it means sacrificing some ideological purity – on the other hand, the need to stand by foundational principles, even if it means alienating potential supporters. The specific context isn’t really important though. Life is full of these contradictions – pick any one you like. The important thing is the advice the meme offered: if you find yourself leaning too far in one direction, try leaning the other way.
I was so used to viewing contradictions as something that need to be resolved. Figure out which opposing force is the correct one and cling to that conviction until it becomes necessary to switch teams. I was used to thinking of balance as something that needed to be maintained directly at the midpoint of two ends of a spectrum. Something stressful and static, not fluid and responsive. But to think about contradiction and balance as an exercise in leaning in and leaning away – that way of thinking transforms the world from something to be answered and then put away into something to be continually interacted with. It welcomes the inevitability of unanswerable questions. It recasts nuance, contradiction, paradox, change, and burning questions into new roles. Not as problems to be solved but as the source of heat at the very center of life.
Buy / listen here.