a tree near the edge

on a trip to beirut, i went paragliding, which required running off a steep cliff and continuing to run until we had taken flight. it takes some balls to do that. the instruction is easy enough to understand, but there’s something about running towards the edge of a cliff that makes stopping seem like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. unfortunately, the takeoff depends on you continuing past the point where you might prefer to reconsider.

i panicked on the first attempt and stopped running. we hadn’t taken off fully, so the operator and i headed into the thick of trees just beneath the cliff. i could have been impaled by a branch, but i came away with a bruised knee. when we made it back up, i insisted on going again, which meant returning to the same instruction i hadn’t managed to follow the first time. this time i kept running, and we took off.

among the things i remember from that outing is a crooked tree near the edge of the cliff. when i think about it now, i find myself wondering what i’m comparing it with. probably a tree with a straight trunk and roughly the same amount happening on either side, the sort you could draw without having a particular tree in mind. that image is so familiar that it hardly feels like a preference. you notice the crookedness of an actual tree before you notice that you’ve brought along an idea of how it ought to have grown.

but the tree had grown there, near that cliff, and the one in my head hadn’t had to grow anywhere. i don’t know what accounted for its shape or what would have happened if it had grown differently. i could see where it was standing without knowing much about what made standing there possible, which leaves me with a fairly incomplete picture. calling it unbalanced would require knowing more than how closely it resembled the tree i expected.

i suspect something similar happens when i picture a balanced life. the days are reasonably well arranged, work takes its portion without spilling too far into everything else, and there’s enough time for people and enough time to be left alone. i can recognise the appeal of this without being entirely sure whose life i’m picturing. there isn’t much in it that would account for a particular person having particular things to do. nobody has become interested in something at an inconvenient time, or needed more rest than they expected, or discovered that what they thought would take an afternoon is going to take considerably longer.

a piece of work can do that quite easily. you spend most of the day trying to understand something and only begin to get somewhere towards the end, by which point the reasonable thing might be to stop. sometimes you should. but sometimes stopping means leaving just as the work has become possible, and returning tomorrow to spend a good part of the morning finding your way back. giving it more time can look excessive if you’re only looking at the hours. it might make more sense if you knew what was happening inside them, or what finishing would make possible afterwards.

that afterwards does quite a lot of work in how we explain our lives to ourselves. the current arrangement is temporary, and the things we’re not making room for will have their turn once this particular difficulty is over. often that’s true. it’s also possible for the difficulty to change while the arrangement stays exactly the same, so that you’re always responding to something new without noticing how familiar the response has become. there’s another deadline, another reason to put something off, and each one seems reasonable enough that you don’t quite register how long you’ve been making the same promise.

what makes this difficult is that a single week probably doesn’t tell you much either way. you could spend it almost entirely at work and still have a life with room in it, just as a calendar with evenings carefully left free doesn’t tell us whether you spend them feeling that you ought to be working. the hours are easy to count. it’s harder to account for the things you continue carrying around after you’ve supposedly put them down, or for the difference between having time available and feeling able to use it.

friendship seems to allow for some of this more naturally. you can know that someone has very little to give at the moment without taking their absence as a complete account of the friendship. knowing them gives you more to go on than the last few conversations. perhaps you do most of the calling for a while, and it doesn’t feel like a burden because you aren’t trying to find the whole relationship inside each exchange. but that understanding depends on there being a relationship beyond the explanation. at some point you might need to talk about your own life, and whether there’s room for that matters more than whether you can produce a convincing reason for why there hasn’t been.

i think this is where the idea of unevenness becomes more useful to me, and also less convenient. it allows for a life to take a shape that makes sense for the person living it, but it doesn’t tell them that whatever shape it has taken must therefore be fine. you can care deeply about the work that exhausts you. you can understand why a friend has been absent and still miss them. recognising the circumstances doesn’t make the cost disappear, although it might help you decide which costs you’re willing to carry and which ones you’ve simply become accustomed to.

there probably isn’t an arrangement that settles that decision permanently. something that gave you room a year ago can begin to crowd you without changing very much itself, because you’ve changed or something else now needs a place in your life. i can see why a more fixed idea of balance would be reassuring. you could follow it and know whether you were doing well. having to keep paying attention is less satisfying than finding the right proportions, especially when you can look at a perfectly ordinary week and still be unsure what needs to change.

the tree is easier to hold in mind than all of this, which is perhaps part of its appeal. i can remember its crookedness without knowing the history of how it came to stand that way. with a life, at least there’s the possibility of finding out a little more. you can notice what keeps being postponed, what has become easier, whether the arrangement still gives you room to do the things it was supposed to make possible. i’m less certain that i would know balance by its shape, but i think i’d want to spend some time with the person living inside it before deciding.