It’s All Middle Anyway

Is it a dial, though?
Continuous range?
Do pain and pleasure,
Peace and suffering

Fill out a smooth scale,
Calibrated cline?
It’s not the minor
Question that it seems.

Equanimity
As eudaimonic
Target for mystics
And philosophers

Depends on balance.
There’s nothing golden
About a mean if
It doesn’t exist.

Feelings alternate,
Sure, conditions change.
Intense suffering
Is far from pleasure,

But that doesn’t mean
They’re scaled opposites,
That they correspond,
That there’s a midpoint.

The lure of balance
Is that it seems not
Greedy but modest,
Possible, cogent,

While hedonism
Is obviously
Unsustainable.
But what if it’s not?