On Sundays, there is a fresh fruit vegetable bizarre near my apartment and every price there is determined with a metal balance - kilograms on one side, desired item on the other. As a man began to measure my bananas today (I asked for half a kilo), I began imagining a metal balance in my head, where the love and the hate in the universe are put on both sides. I thought of all the people in the world who were probably kissing someone good night, or waking up to breakfast with a loved one, or holding someone tightly enough to remind them that they'll never let them go. And, in my head I saw the love side of the balance hanging low...
And then I thought about violence that exists in the world, and the way people sometimes blindly hate, and also some conflicts that seem unending. I imagined the scale being tipped quickly -- like when you're sitting on the end of a seesaw and there's a really heavy person on the opposite end so you're floating in the air and then they get up and you crash to the ground. That's how quickly the balance can change.
I feel like the world rests on this balance - this ability to either be weighed down by the bad or the good, and I wished when the world tipped to hate the man at the market could add pieces of love to bring it back in the balance just like he added extra bananas for me today when the balance was uneven.
Recently my life has been a microcosm of this metaphor, as I believe all of ours are most of the time, but only sometimes do we see it. Only sometimes are we forced to think of this scale and make decisions based on this balance. The hardest part, to me, is that that when you are forced to examine this you see it as a static calculation and the bad hangs so heavy. I almost forgot that we have the power to add love to the scale. And more impressively we have the power to add weight to the love that already exists. I surrendered to love this week and miraculously that bad weight seems but a feather.
ReplyDeleteWe can illuminate the existing love in the world. We must show people it is already here and that will always tip the scale.