"One never comes into embarrassment, if one is ready to balance. To ask oneself never in embarrassment, what have you in these decades made"
About this Quote
Embarrassment, here, is not the fleeting blush after a faux pas but the deeper unease that comes when life demands an accounting. To be “ready to balance” is to cultivate a habit of weighing impulses against principles, ambition against conscience, speed against depth. Balance is not stasis; it is a practiced responsiveness, the continual attentiveness that keeps a person from drifting into extremes and then awakening to a life that feels unchosen. When one has practiced balance, self-scrutiny does not arrive as accusation but as a familiar companion. The ledger is never closed, because it is kept daily.
The second line is a summons to periodic reckoning. “What have you in these decades made?” is less about tallying trophies than asking whether a life has produced coherence, works, relationships, and commitments that bear the stamp of one’s values. The embarrassment to be avoided is the late realization that years were filled but not formed. Balance prevents this because it forces choices to pass through the sieve of meaning: not merely can I do this, but should I, and at what cost to other obligations that also claim me?
Such balance has a moral dimension. It requires resisting the seductions of one-sidedness: total careerism, total self-sacrifice, total pleasure, total duty. It also has a temporal dimension: remembering the long arc while acting in the present. A person who revises course as soon as misalignment is sensed, who rebalances when a job corrodes integrity, when comfort smothers growth, when public success starves private bonds, builds a pattern that stands up to the decades. Then the question of what has been made can be asked without flinching, because the answer has been shaped piece by piece.
To live ready to balance is to live with a quiet, ongoing audit. It is a discipline that turns embarrassment into vigilance, and vigilance into a life that can be owned.
