Find Balance in the Gentle Waves
Balance. Sometimes it feels like such a pipe dream. Just when you feel like you find it, something changes and you’re tipping over again! Seems like we all have so many things to juggle in our lives at once, and it just gets worse as you grow older and your responsibilities increase. You can feel like you're trying to live three different lives at once trying to balance the different aspects of your life and personality.
Take heart though. Life is always moving, time doesn’t stand still. The now is ever changing. Thus, the act of balancing your life isn't about finding a static, rigid recipe to follow. Instead, think of it like floating along in the waves. You keep responding to the currents, and you notice the act of balance is really just being relaxed in the flow of life, and making small movements to gently right yourself, responding to the everchanging waves.
I love this image. It really speaks to me on a deep level about my own experience about trying to find my own balance, feeling so drawn apart by different things and the constant struggle to not have my routines collapse all around me. Once I got diagnosed with ADHD it helped explain so much about my life, but that was still a far cry from being able to manage it! I lived so long trying to rigidly control everything in my life and completely over planning everything, terrified of any kind of failure. I couldn’t deal with failure, and at the same time I couldn’t stop things occasionally going wrong no matter how hard I tried. And the energy I used in stressing over everything left me completely overwhelmed and exhausted.
This image really captures what I learned for myself. She balances between water and air, part of both worlds. She feels the seabreeze on her face and hair, while her locks morph into waves and foam, because in addition to balancing between air and water, she’s also a part of both elements. Listening to herself means being connected to them, feeling them inside and outside herself. Occupying this moment in time and place, feeling how you fit into it right now, and enjoying that feeling.