Equanimity ≠ Balance: Eros, Responsivity, and Deep Aliveness
We often gloss equanimity (upekkhā) as something like "the balanced heart," or in various ways try to talk about this quality that is less reactive to pleasure and pain, friend and enemy, success and failure. But as anyone who has tried to walk on a slack line, or stand on one foot, or ride a bike, or just stand with your feet together and your eyes closed knows, balance is never stable. The thing we call balance is more properly "balancing," a constant dance of falling and righting.
The sign of skill is that the falls and the corrections become more and more slight, so the system isn't startled, but relaxes into a sort of vibration away from, back toward, and through an abstract center line that never becomes a permanent resting place. To be alive to to be not at rest.
Then the Buddha (and all rebirth-recognizing cultures) comes along and says that death also is no final rest. Equanimity is the dance of becoming more skilled at balancing, so that as long as we are upright in this world, we live less and less startled. Our falling away from center is less dramatic and more like a little sway of the hips. But of course the thing balancing requires of us is non-distraction. Because when the mind falls away from center it often goes far, and the body quickly follows.
