The Balance of Life
There are so many things to juggle in life these days. We’ve got our work and our families. We’ve got our friends and our relationships. We have current events and current affairs to keep up with. And that doesn’t include all the day to day stresses and opportunities. That doesn’t include all the day to day hopes and doubts. Life is finding it’s way back to normal, but normal seems to be a balance of overwhelming and over booking. We all seem to be adjusting to our new lives of working hard and playing harder. We live in a “do more” society that feeds the mentality of more is always better.
What we actually need more than anything is to slow down. We need to take a nice slow breath and find some time to relax and reflect. As the world speeds up, we need to pace ourselves through the next phases of life. Yet for some reason, most of us find that we need to earn our relaxation. That for some reason shouldn’t just get time to sit down and do nothing. Most of us try to reasons to sneak night of being alone. There is a reward, a deserving, some kind of justification, that takes over when trying to balance these basic elements of life. These are not luxuries, these are necessities. We need these moments of peace and solitude to fill ourselves up with peace and calm. We are finding the balance between putting the pieces of our lives back together and taking the parts of isolation into our new beginnings. This balance ebbs and flows into so many parts of our lives. And this time alone should never be earned but always approved.
Most of us are overextending ourselves to be the best at everything that lies in front of us. We are trying to do our best as parents, making sure our minis are taken care of before we take care of ourselves. We are trying to do the best we can with keeping our lives organized, even when disaster is spreading out of the dishwasher, the laundry and the never ending yard work. We are trying to make time for new friendships and lost relationships, even when we sometimes feel like we don’t even know ourselves anymore. Basically, we are trying to do our best at being our best. But we aren’t being the best at taking care of ourselves and giving ourselves a much needed break.
I am a big fan of being the best version of yourself. But to do that, we need to eliminate outside expectations. Sometimes our best is putting on pajamas at 5pm with a large glass of wine, a Tony’s chocolate bar and some trashy television. Sometimes our best is pressing snooze on a Tuesday morning to sleep in an extra 20 minutes, drink coffee in bed and scroll through social media. Our best doesn’t have to be justified by our expectations. We can be our best by doing what’s right in the moment. Our best right now doesn’t have to be reaching out and away from ourselves. The best can be what’s right in the moment, with no regret afterwards.
We can try to stop prioritizing what we think we should do, and start listening to ourselves and doing what we want to do. We have spent the past two years following directions and doing what we have to do. I think it is time that we sneak away and do somethings for ourselves just because. We do not need to get through x amount of items on our to do list before we can enjoy ourselves. We don’t need to overbook our days so we can’t accomplish our lists and have no time to just be. Sometimes it feels like we have made life a game of rewards. Somehow it seems we have lost some of our abilities to live spontaneously with ourselves and with the people around us.
We don’t need to-do lists that suck up our free time and never seem to get finished. We don’t need to be busy to be productive. We do need to feel successful, and only we get to define our own successes. We need to finish the day ready for the next day and not wishing the weekend to come. The weekend will be there, but we don’t want to miss the time in-between.