Having a balanced life means, at minimum, that attention is being devoted to the four components of holistic health: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. Or to put it in integral terms, practice and time are spent within the spheres of Body, Mind, Spirit, and Shadow. It seems especially important for the body and mind that some equilibrium be maintained between work and play, activity and rest,  struggle and acceptance. The dour person needs to laugh a bit; the joker needs to grieve occassionally. The earnest person needs to sometimes get into the spirit of irony and the ironic person needs to be genuine. Paying the bills and sex must both have their due. Much of this, of course, is helped if the body is energetically in balance, which is aided by massage, acupuncture, yoga, and meditation. It seems important to bring up the Buddhist concept of equanimity here. In equanimity the mind accepts things as they are and doesn't get lost in reactions. There's a lovely article on this in the Winter 2005 volume of Tricycle, which quotes the Buddha:

                                                    As a solid mass of rock
                                                        Is not stirred by the wind,
                                                     So a sage is not moved
                                                        By praise and blame.
                                                     As a deep lake
                                                         Is clear and undisturbed
                                                     So a sage becomes clear
                                                        Upon hearing the Dharma.
                                                     Virtuous people always let go.
                                                         They don't prattle about pleasures and desires.
                                                     Touched by happiness and then by suffering,
                                                          The sage shows no sign of being elated or depressed.

                                                    -Dhammapada 81-83

Caring less and less what other people think of you or the path that your life has taken. Coming into a greater awareness of who you really are, both in the sense of a personality and a Self, and realizing that your life does relate deeply to the world. The reduction of ego. The continuing enrichment of long-term relationships and friendships. And, frankly, sex gets better and better, despite what they say about the age at which men are in their sexual prime.

I would like to be able to say that, among other things, good things about getting older are that one's abilities to affect one's community and the world in positive ways increase, that there is some satisfaction in having accomplished things that benefit others, and that you find yourself in an increasingly comfortable situation financially. But I'm far from being there experientially.

I was working on a website with my partner Chris Hughes and my share was a blog devoted to body and a blog devoted to soul. I chose the Paul Klee image for decoration as one representative of soul. In the first place, it reminded me of soul because of the insistent and particular idiosyncracies of a highly personalized style through which the world is viewed or brought into being. The prominent black arrow descending from above, however, was what made me most think of soul, especially as it is viewed separately from spirit. I had been reading Thomas Moore and James Hillman on the soul at the time and was quite taken (even moved) by the idea of the soul being something heavier, denser, messier, more earthbound, and more complicated than pure ethereal spirit, which is always striving to return to its source in upward flight. The arrow came to signify for me the descending soul and the line of destiny or fate that it is bound to fulfill if true to itself. It is something like a Platonic idea moving down into a cacophany of attractive forms that prompt attention in any number of possible directions in a dense, messy, fascinating, charming world.