I heard an interesting thing from Dr Sydnee McElroy on her podcast Sawbones. In one of the later episodes she mentions that human bodies are living chemical labs, at all times churning chemical reactions back and forth. This means, she explains, that we are at constant chemical imbalance, which causes the reactions to happen: there would be no oxygen transfer from lung tissue to the bloodstream without an imbalance in the oxygen content between the air we breathe and the red blood cells. There is one way to achieve complete chemical balance in the body, she concludes, and that is when the body dies.
Chemistry and Life
This whole bit was by way of explaining the purpose of enzymes in the body as part of a larger explanation on the medical properties of pineapples and their constituent chemicals, little of which seemed as shocking as the “chemical imbalance” she casually dropped in the intro. Eastern philosophy (and therefore eastern martial arts like Karate) is extremely preoccupied with the concept of balance and it’s something people in the West also accept as a good thing, something worth seeking. And yet here I am now off-kilter thinking is that even true? Surely 5000 years’ worth of intelligent humans haven’t been completely wrong about this? No, something else is afoot.
Language is a tricky thing, as we’ve discussed before, and I think it may be the source of this sudden cognitive dissonance. It’s about the way “balance” is defined. In chemistry balance is the end point of entropy, a system that gets to a point where nothing moves because there is no energy transfer. More broadly however balance is a state in which opposing forces cancel each other out to reach that state of lack of motion. In living things balance is homeostasis.
Life is Chaos?
So is imbalance life? Yes, mostly. No life exists without some chaos. Therefore, is balance death? Yes and no, depending on the context. Also on the degree. Very few things are binary in the real world, most things exist on some kind of spectrum. So do balance and imbalance, being opposite ends of a sliding scale. Too much order and things shut down. Too much chaos and things break. There is a happy medium where life happens and is able to grow. This golden mean is found in basically all of human philosophy throughout history. This mix of order and chaos. I prefer this symbol for it, rather than the word “balance”:
