Balance Is The Key ... But What's Yours

Points to Ponder #9- Balance is the key ... but, what's yours?

Seriously, how often have you heard that you need to find a balance?  Whether you are talking about family, work, health, money, relationships, etc., the key is always to find a good balance.  If only it were really that easy.  There are times in life when everything seems to be in sync; when you feel as though you have enough of everything and nothing is throwing you out of whack.  BUT, let's be honest, those times are very rare.  Those times don't last longer than a month or two, heck, sometimes even a day or two.  And then the rest of the weeks or months or years you feel like a circus dog trying to run in a circular ball that never stops spinning.

I like to compare life to laundry.  It seems that every once in a while, every dirty piece of laundry is clean, folded and put away.  In that rare moment, you feel like you can handle life, like things aren't that bad and the dirty laundry wasn't that hard to get under control.  You feel that way until just a short time later when your child wets the bed or spills a class of juice all over the table cloth or walks through the largest mud pile you've ever seen.  Even if one of those normal things don't happen, later in that same day that all the laundry was complete, you look in the baskets that live in the various spots in your home, and they all seem to be full.  What?  Just hours before EVERYTHING was clean.  That's how life is.  As soon as you feel like you've got this thing called life figured out, something changes or something happens that throws you for a major loop.

So, balance is definitely the key.  But, you can't look at what others say is a balanced life.  You have to look at your own needs, your own wants and your own issues.  We all have these things ... needs, wants and issues.  And they all affect us in different ways.  If we take time to examine our lives and figure out what makes us feel complete, we can start to achieve a small sense of balance in our lives.  The struggle is that our needs, wants and issues are constantly changing just as the world constantly moves.  Not to mention the fact that if you are in a family, you have to also consider the needs, wants and issues of everyone living in your home or in the family that you care for outside of your home.

I have come to the conclusion that balance is really just a juggling act.  Its about who can have the most balls in the air and manage them without letting them hit the ground.  We all do it differently.  Some are able to do it with more grace.  But, the bottom line is ... if you can manage the balls minute after minute, possibly day after day, and sometimes (thankfully) year after year, then you have some balance in your life. 

Don't be so hard on yourself when you have a dirty house, a squabble with your spouse, a car that looks like you live in it, a workout that didn't get complete, a budget that went a little over last month, an extra beer that left you with a morning headache ... life is hard.  Do the best the can you can with what you have to work with and with as much force as you have day after day.  That's really all anyone can ask of you and your balance.

Good luck!