If everything turned out perfectly at that moment and stayed perfectly forever, you had the balance. You don't always know until the situation's actually done. But you can judge for yourself, "Did you go into anger, did you go into grief, did you go into indifference and not caring?" Because those are the three directions that if you don't have Compassion and Equanimity balanced, it's going to go one way or the other. How much anger did you have towards the situation? How much grief did you have? How many times were you just not caring and just wanted to walk away, and didn't even care if anything was resolved at all? When we have a situation and there are a lot of difficulties, we would like the Compassion to stay there totally. To have the balance means that it always stays there. Anytime there's a difficulty, Compassion always has to be there. Equanimity doesn't always have to be there, to a certain extent, but it certainly helps, especially when things are not going the way that we'd like them to go. That's having a perfect balance. Sometimes when we first encounter a type of problem, there's no way we're going to have the right balance. We haven't got the experience, we've never done this before, we're going to go a little too far to the right, we're going to go a little too far to the left.
If you remember the saying of the Buddha to Ananda, a good, kind, wise spiritual friend makes the practice hundred percent. In other words, a hundred percent practice is to have a good, kind, wise spiritual friend. So when we have a difficulty and we're not sure, then asking that good friend some advice often helps. If we've never ever experienced that situation, if we have no idea even of a remotely similar situation, how can we expect ourselves to have the balance? It's something brand new. So we're probably going to be swayed one way or swayed the other. It can be helpful to a certain degree to realize that even an enlightened person, by definition, can't always solve problems. The Buddha couldn't save everybody who came to him. He couldn't even solve the problem of his own cousin, who tried to kill him a number of times, he couldn't even help him. So even an enlightened person cannot always solve every problem. That's important to know, because as much as you try to maintain a balance and you think you have an ideal, "If only I had enough techniques I'd be able to fix this," no, it may never be fixed, because of the other people involved. Sometimes you have to rely on the Equanimity being a bit stronger than the Compassion, and we move away from the situation hoping that it gets solved, but realizing at that time it's just not possible.