You remember being a kid and playing on a seesaw?  How it was always a question of getting someone who weighed about the same as you to play with you?  You got someone who was heavy, he'd leave you up in the air; if you ever got down far enough to touch the ground, he could send you flying up all over again.There was never ever any contest, especially if you were as skinny as I was.

The way we relate to life is a lot like it was on the playground.  Here we stand, looking for our place in the world, and here stands the world.  The great, fat world.  We get on one end of the seesaw, the world gets on the other.  Up we go.  Or down we go.  Whatever the fat world wants, the fat world gets.  We're always, you could say, up in the air or down in the dumps, depending on what kind of mood the world is in.  The world dominates our lives, it outweighs us so thoroughly we hardly ever think it could be any different.

As the old saying goes, the world is too much with us.  The world drives everything in our lives, doesn't it?  And everything, no matter how trivial, seems to outweigh us in importance.  We actually forget ourselves, don't remember that we even have a self to forget.  Everything outside of us - our jobs, our possessions, our status in society - is always outweighing us, keeping us up in the air or flat on the ground.

We can't expect the world to loosen its hold on our lives.  It's got us caught on the seesaw; it's got such a strong hold on our lives that we can't see a way to jump off.  But if we want balance in our life, we've got to figure a way to develop our selves, to literally become more substantial.  We need to recognize the imbalance in our lives and find ways to develop weight within us that will be strong enough to change the picture, so that things can at least be equalized and finally reversed so that the world becomes like a feather and we're the weighty thing.

I'm not speaking metaphorically here; I mean literally there's more weight in you than exists in all the things of the world, however "real," however weighty they seem.  We use that phrase, "this is a weighty matter," and we believe it.  What we have to do is reclaim that weight for ourselves, to develop what you could call the "substance of truth" within and to let it accumulate in us, so we stand with a certain firmness, a certain steadfastness that is in direct opposition to the world of events.  That's really what the world is about - all the events of life; that's what all the great traditions say.

If you want to speak of Christianity, you're talking about Jesus pointing to John the Baptist as having that substance in him such that he could not be shaken.  John was a wild man.  He had what people used to call "sand."  Even though he predates the Gospel and the whole development of Christ's work, he was held up by Jesus as an exemplar of that weight that cannot be shaken.  He would not be moved.  When he went out into the desert, what did he go look for?  Did he look for a reed shaken by the wind?  No, he would not bend, he had so much power.

And then you can go into Hinduism.  Take the very word "guru."  It's a word that peo-ple apply to everyone from computer ex-perts to baseball coaches, but  "guru" is connected to the word "weight" or "gravity."  The guru has this weight, he stands firm, and everything else moves around, but he's still there.

That's what we have to develop in our own life in relation to the events of our life: an ability to stand firm against all the distractions and pulls that life presents us with.  Who wants to be a feather in the wind, who wants to get blown away by every little thing?  You can't blame your blowsiness on the events of your life.  You've got to develop enough of a counter-weight to life to navigate those events as they need to be addressed.

It's like with a rushing stream: you drift along on its surface and everything may seem fine, peaceful even.  But stand up in the middle of the stream, and you'll feel its full strength rushing against you, pushing you where it wants you to go.

So when you do something as simple as sitting down to a meal or getting into your car, take a moment and collect yourself.  Just let the day's momentum stop for a moment, and take physical stock of yourself.  It sounds easy, even attractive, but you'll see that if you do this little exercise, just like standing in the stream, the vortex of the day's events will slap at you more fiercely if you try to go against the usual currents.

So just take those few moments and feel the shape of your body, see what's in front of you, hear the sounds as they come to you, taste whatever's in your mouth, smell the air.  Take a breath, and recognize the fact that you're breathing.  This is essentially a way of actualizing what people mean when they say they're going to center themselves.  It's a simple physical effort and the more you do it, the more grounded you'll become.  Do it a couple of times a day, for a couple of minutes each time.  See what happens, see if it makes a difference, in the mad rush of your life, to stop and remember that you have a life, and that its vehicle is the body.

While everybody else you know is anxiously trying to lose weight, do this simple exercise and see if you don't gain something more important.  See if you can't put a bit more substance in your life, enough to stand against the current, enough to begin to balance out your life.