Balance

An old Chinese farmer took his granddaughter for a walk one day.

Sunshine shadowed them along an ancient path, full of potholes, ruts, loose stones, along the side of steep cliff.

“Why are we going this way, grandpa?”

“You will see soon enough.”

“But, I’m scared.”

“I know.”

The old man kept walking, using a staff that had been his companion for the last 44 years, a gift from a holy man and the Chinese farmer’s most prized possession.

After several hours of the girl’s stumbling and whining, they reached a turnabout where the old man stopped and sat.

“What are we doing? I want to go home.”

“Look. What do you see?

“Hills and rocks and stuff.”

“What did you just experience? How did you make it up that broken road?”

“Walking?”

“Look deeper.”

The girl sat and looked around her, at the path ahead and behind, at the sky and the bottom of the ravine, at the trees on the side of the hill and the space in between the objects: the space in between the objects, between the rocks and the trees, between her and her grandfather, between her and the clouds.

She then realized that the space between the objects held it all together, balancing it all.

“Balance,” slipped out of her almost involuntarily.

“What got you here?”

“Balance.”

“How do we get out of here?”

“Balance.”

“What is balance?”

“Balance is like harmony; it’s when all of the objects are in a state of equilibrium.”

“Now do you understand the theory of relativity?”

The young girl got up, walked past her grandfather up the path and never returned because she finally understood that he lived in an alternate universe where everything is curved, atoms swerve, and gravity is too damned complicated, but, somehow, it was all balanced – or was it?

She didn’t really care.

She just wanted to find a place to charge her phone.