Rainbows, Rooftop Pools, and the Search for Emotional Balance

Some Lunch conversations arrive quietly.

No dramatic debates. No dragons to train. No rebellious vegetables offering life advice. Just a table of familiar faces scattered across continents, connecting through occasionally stubborn internet connections and carrying the ordinary emotions that come with ordinary lives.

Which, as it turns out, was exactly the point.

This week we gathered to talk about emotional balance, a topic that landed at our table with almost suspicious timing. Nathalie was joining us from Seoul, somewhere between four years in South Korea and a future in Ghana. Rosie arrived nursing a headache. Fruitloop was steering the conversation. And the Mayor was already mentally preparing for tomorrow’s potato peeling.

In other words, life was happening.

The meeting began with technology reminding us who is really in charge. Nathalie’s connection struggled despite having 5G. The Mayor immediately informed her that South Korea was clearly behind the times because everyone else had apparently upgraded to “25G” already. This diagnosis was delivered with complete confidence and absolutely no scientific evidence.

Fortunately, the weather was behaving much better than the internet.

Nathalie described beautiful sunshine, calm surroundings, and a peaceful moment before another major chapter of life begins. Meanwhile, preparations continued for the famous Hunspach Summer fête, where the Mayor promised to look for familiar faces, and possibly Nathalie, although he suspected Nathalie would be still be in South Korea. The weather forecast looked perfect: twenty-four to twenty-five degrees and plenty of opportunity for celebration.

From there, Fruitloop guided us toward the heart of the discussion.

What exactly is emotional balance?

Nathalie reflected on the challenge of navigating positive emotions, negative emotions, worries, hopes, and everything in between. Sometimes, she suggested, we build protective walls around ourselves—not because we don’t feel deeply, but because feeling everything all at once can become overwhelming.

Rosie approached the question differently. She reminded us that not every emotion belongs to us. Sometimes someone else’s anger arrives in the room and we accidentally pick it up as if it were our own luggage. Understanding that distinction, she suggested, can make emotional life much easier.

The Mayor, naturally, took a balanced approach to balance itself.

Whether we experience success or failure, he argued, emotional balance matters. Too much success can make us boastful. Too much failure can make us miserable company. The secret, perhaps unsurprisingly, lies somewhere in the middle.

As the conversation unfolded, bigger questions emerged.

Can moving to a new country improve emotional balance?

Nathalie answered with the honesty of someone living through exactly that experience. Leaving one life behind while stepping into another is profoundly destabilising. There is excitement, uncertainty, reluctance, anticipation, and fear all mixed together. The challenge is learning how to carry those emotions without letting them carry us.

Can emotional balance be learned?

Rosie was convinced it can. Every emotion teaches us something, she said. The important part is understanding what that lesson might be.

The Mayor, meanwhile, confessed that he might not be the ideal spokesperson for emotional balance because he was still trying to locate the source of a mysterious cat-pee smell in his house. Nevertheless, he offered an observation about emotionally balanced people: sometimes they can be difficult to read. His sister-in-law, he explained, always appears perfectly neutral. By the time you realise how she feels about something, the conversation is already over.

The discussion wandered, as good Lunch conversations do, between practical realities and bigger reflections.

Physical health, Nathalie reminded us, has a powerful impact on emotional well-being. A healthy body can strengthen the mind, just as mental resilience can sometimes support physical recovery. Fruitloop agreed, pointing to exercise, movement, and healthy habits as important contributors to emotional calm.

Rosie added that understanding our emotions and controlling them are not opposing ideas. They work together. Asking ourselves why we feel something can often reveal more than the emotion itself.

Not every answer was serious.

When asked whether humour could be a serious tool for emotional balance, the Mayor surprised us with a firm no. Humour, he argued, is deeply personal. What one person finds hilarious, another may find confusing, offensive, or simply unfunny. Besides, humour can sometimes act like a bandage—it covers the wound without fixing the underlying problem.

Then came the Fruitloopy questions.

And this is where emotional balance became wonderfully strange.

If emotional balance were a city, Nathalie imagined a peaceful place free from fear, filled with good intentions and good people. A beautiful utopia that probably doesn’t exist but remains worth imagining.

If emotional balance were a Brazilian festival, Rosie immediately knew what would happen. People would celebrate life itself—with music, food, smiles, friends, and enough positive energy to power an entire neighbourhood.

When asked what colour represented emotional balance, the Mayor chose not one colour but all of them. A rainbow, he said. The full spectrum. Diversity, beauty, life, and balance all existing together.

Which, if you think about it, may have been the most balanced answer of the day.

Finally, we were asked which emotion we would remove from the world for one day.

Nathalie chose anger and aggression.

Rosie agreed. Imagine, she suggested, a whole day where nobody was angry, nervous, or aggressive.

Fruitloop leaned toward jealousy and envy.

The Mayor refused to remove anything.

Without contrast, he argued, we would lose perspective. Joy means more because sadness exists. Calm means more because chaos occasionally visits. Removing an emotion, even temporarily, might do more harm than good.

And somewhere in that answer was the theme that had quietly threaded through the entire conversation.

Perhaps emotional balance isn’t about eliminating difficult emotions.

Perhaps it is about making room for all of them.

As our time together came to an end, the Mayor offered the final thought. Peace, he said, is where everything begins. Add some reggae music, Jamaican dreadlocks, and a chilled bottle of Chardonnay, and you might be getting close.

We laughed, said our goodbyes, and returned to our various corners of the world.

And maybe that’s emotional balance after all.

Not the absence of storms. Not permanent happiness. Not a city without problems or a life without change.

Just a rainbow wide enough to hold every colour.