Can Balance Be Found Without Breaking?

This book is the third in the six-book Balance series: Measure · The Human · Breaking · Meaning · Life · Center. The books refer to one another; it is best to read them in order.

The transforming possibility of crisis

In the book Measure we said that balance is not a beginning but an outcome. In the book The Human we saw how the scale within a person slips. This book begins where the scale breaks.

No one loves a crisis. Illness, bankruptcy, separation, the death of someone you love. These upset the order of life. Everything that stood in its place yesterday scatters overnight. But the root of the word crisis is interesting. In Greek, "krisis" means to separate, to decide. Physicians once called crisis the day on which the course of an illness turned: on that day the patient either began to recover or grew worse. A crisis is a fork in the road.

Do people think they will be left alone, merely because they say, "We believe," and not be tested?

Al-Ankabut 29:2 (meaning)

To be tested is to be measured. When gold is thrown into the fire, its purity comes to light. The fire does not destroy the gold; it separates the foreign matter within it. A crisis, too, most often does not destroy a person. It separates: what is truly his, and what has merely clung to him.

Suffering's search for meaning

Viktor Frankl was a Viennese psychiatrist who was held in concentration camps during the Second World War. The book he wrote after his liberation was translated into Turkish as "İnsanın Anlam Arayışı" (Man's Search for Meaning). Frankl says he observed this in the camp: those who had a reason to stay alive, who were waiting to be reunited with a child or to finish a work left half done, could endure the harshest conditions longer. He often recalls a sentence from Nietzsche: He who has a "why" to live can bear almost any "how."

Suffering is not meaningful in itself. No one seeks suffering, and no one should. But the answer given to suffering can be meaningful. In Frankl's words, everything can be taken from a person but one thing: the freedom to choose one's attitude in the face of circumstances.

Or did you think you would enter Paradise without there coming upon you what came upon those who passed before you? Hardship and adversity touched them, and they were so shaken that the Messenger and those who believed with him said, "When is the help of Allah?" Know that the help of Allah is near.

Al-Baqarah 2:214 (meaning)

The verse does not condemn the question "when?" It says that the Messenger himself asked it. To ask a question in the midst of suffering is not a lack of faith. It is being human. And the answer has been placed right beside the question: It is near.

Rebuilding

In Japan there is a tradition of mending broken ceramics with a lacquer mixed with gold dust. It is called "kintsugi." The break is not hidden; it is brought out with gold. The mended bowl is considered more precious than before. Because now it has a story.

Psychologists describe something similar. In some people who have lived through severe upheavals, a change called "post-traumatic growth" appears over time: a deeper gratitude for life, valuing relationships more, coming to know one's own strength anew. This does not mean that suffering is a good thing. It means that after suffering a person can build something.

Can balance be found without breaking? Perhaps it can. But balance found without breaking is often an untested balance. A tree that has never seen the wind does not know how deep its roots go. Breaking is sometimes the place where a person sees his own roots for the first time.