The Way of Balance
I just finished reading Frank Herbert’s Dune a couple of days ago. It’s a really fantastic book, perhaps the best work of fiction I’ve ever read, in fact. It comes highly reccomended.
The book is full of beautiful and deeply meaningful passages such as the one that follows:
There is in all things a pattern that is a part of our
universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace- those
qualities you find always in that which the true artist
captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, the
way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the
creosote bush or the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy
those patterns in our lives and our society, seeking the
rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet it is
possible to find peril in the finding of ultimate
perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains
its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move towards death.
-From “Collected sayings of Muad’Dib” by the Princess Irulan
This balance between seeking knowledge of the order of life while accepting its eternal mutability (and therefore its ultimate unknowability) is a key theme in the book. This is a profound truth, I think. Certainty truly is death. Nothing that lives is fixed. Bruce Lee put it well when he said (and he probably wasn’t the first), “Things live by moving, and gain strength as they go.” Life then, is change- the two are inextricably linked.
All my life I’ve been driven by this hunger for perfection of different sorts, to be the best at this or that, to think the right thoughts or have the right beliefs, to be an ideal person. Little did I know that all of these lofty certainties I sought reeked of death because of their fixity.
I often felt like I was killing myself, but I never saw it quite this way. The joy must be in the journey. There really isn’t a real destination to be found anywhere in the universe, except as constucts that live only in our minds.
So I think more often I will try to set my sights not on the apex or the end of things, but on being in harmony with the rhythms, the flows, the graceful, natural patterns that tell us things are living as they were intended.
