Equilibrium

It all started when I was born. I spent some time lazing around but even someone like me for whom procrastination is a religion, I realized I had to try to stand up and then walk and I succeeded. Equilibrioception they called it. Though at that age they just told me it was keeping my balance. That is the first equilibrium I learnt about, unwittingly as it may be.

Then came school. The word equal was used a lot as was equilibrium. In the bottom of their hearts everyone despises inequality. It is much more difficult to comprehend, I think, than an equation with an ‘equal to’. That is all I heard in 10 long years that I spent in school. Life was all about expressing language in equations which revolved around chemical, physical and mathematical equilibria. Engineering followed suit.

In business school I encountered that word again. Again financial, statistical and strategic equilibria swamped my horizon. They very nature, it seems, of studying phenomena is freezing them at an instant where you can call the two sides, of the representing equation, equal.

After all this studying, I suddenly realized that the facts of life were known to me at a very early age. It was not standing still that I had to learn but walking. Thus life exists not at equilibrium but between two states of it.