Out of Balance

We continued our way through the Saloum Delta and stayed a few days near Toubakouta, anchored in sight of one lodge or another. That was also where our dinghy flipped on the first evening. I wrote about that in my last piece, Borrowed Calm.

A little later, we noticed safari vehicles standing in front of some of the hotels in the village and found out that there was a game reserve nearby. So one day we jumped on a motorbike and went for a game drive.

The reserve covers around 6,000 hectares, so there was enough ground to drive around for a few hours and actually feel as if we were out in something wide and open. We saw buffalo, rhino, giraffe, zebra, and a lot of antelope.

Walking with Lions

And then there were the lions.

They keep twelve of them in a separate area, and it is possible to go on a lion walk with two of them. So suddenly there we were, walking with a male and a female lion in touching distance.

It was an amazing feeling.

And at the same time, it left me with questions.

Because however impressive it is to be that close, these are still lions in captivity, kept for our experience, in a country that used to be theirs long before it ever became a destination for people like me. If you go back far enough, lions lived here freely. Nature had its own balance. Now we move through it with safari cars, fenced reserves, managed encounters, and a quiet assumption that the world is here for us to arrange.

What Balance Really Means

That thought stayed with me.

Not only because of the lions, but because it points to something much bigger. We have built a world where more and more of life exists under our control. Livestock now outweigh wild mammals by a huge margin, and poultry outweigh wild birds. We can argue about the reasons. Feeding the world. Efficiency. Survival. Progress. A lot of it may even be true. But it does not change the deeper question: at what point did sharing the world become dominating it?

And maybe the harder question is this: what has all that domination really given us?

More comfort, clearly. More convenience too.

But not necessarily more happiness.

In many ways, life has become easier over the last hundred years. And still, peace of mind has not grown at the same speed. Often the opposite. The more we own, control, manage, and carry, the more stressed we seem to become. Sometimes with money. Sometimes with physical things. Sometimes just with our own minds.

I think that is part of why I care so much about creating spaces where people can step out of all that for a while.

Both of my Reset offers are built around that in different ways. Less noise. Less input. Less pressure to perform. More nature. More silence. More room to think. Not because nature magically fixes us, but because it gets harder to ignore yourself when the noise drops away.

And maybe that is part of balance too.

Not only asking how much we take from the world around us, but also how much we keep taking from ourselves. How much comfort we chase. How much mental clutter we normalize. How much of life becomes management instead of presence.

The lions left me with that.

Not with a clean conclusion. Just with the feeling that something has gone out of balance. In nature, yes. But also in us.

So maybe the better question is not only how we share resources with nature.

Maybe it is also this:

What do you do to come back into balance with your own life?