All of life is a steady, rhythmed breathing in and out. That process occurs without any thought or intent on your part, and yet, it is the thing that keeps you alive. Your whole life, you oscillate between utter breathlessness and lungs full of air, aching to be pushed out. Life happens because of the movement from one to the other and back.

Our lives are made up of the coming and going between two poles on many dimensions. Everyday, you wake up and move forward with the day’s activities. Then every night, you lie down to sleep. You really could not do anything else. You would not survive without sleep for more than a few days and maintain sanity. After a given amount of time, the body forces sleep, like the breath out forces the breath in. You have expelled all the energy and you need to rest. And sleep is more than just inactivity. Your body engages in its regenerative processes while you are sleeping and your brain sifts through experiences, metabolizing and consolidating them into some usable form.

You are productive on a daily basis, and you also need to take time to become inactive and reflective. If you never do those more passive things, you will inevitably be headed in the wrong direction because you have not done the important reorienting your life toward its most recently discerned objectives. You will end up in a crisis or a crash because you were hammering away at all the wrong things. If you are creative, you should create, but then take time to step back from your work and go have a snack.

The breathing in and out happens in relationships, too. Relationships are all about maintaining the delicate balance of each person moving toward the other for connection and responding to one another’s moves to connect. As you know, that can get out of balance rather quickly if one person is making all the moves, and one becomes too passive. Each person must be moving toward the other at different times, and responding tenderly when the other is moving toward them.

In our culture, we tend toward the more “active” processes. It is a learned discipline to practice the more inactive and receptive things, which are just as important to life as their corresponding counter-moves. Neither active nor passive has any value. They only each have value in their ability to potentiate energy by the move from one to the other. That is life.