Life is all about balance.
I’ve been giving this statement a lot of thought. Perhaps it’s just what point I’m at in life. Without getting too philosophical about it, balance seems to be the very essence of life. The Yin Yang comes to mind.
I was working on an exercise that was given to me, whereby I had to choose ten words, write them down, and write the definition of each word on an index card. Each word had to have two definitions. One would be my own (what I thought the word to mean) that I had to write on one side of the index card. The other definition was the official one from a dictionary that I had to write on the other side of the index card. As well, each definition had to be written in a different color. The point of the exercise was to pick one of the ten words and put it somewhere you can see every day as a sort of daily mantra.
The one I chose out of the ten, but funny enough got stuck on the most was ‘balance’.
First, it took a lot of thinking on the side that I was to define. What does balance actually mean to me? Then, when I looked up the definition to write on the other side, there was an ongoing number of definitions as if officially defining the word was difficult as well. Which one is it? Turns out we use the word balance to describe a number of things. As a noun, it’s literal and figurative. It can be physically losing one’s balance, or it can be managing a happy medium of things in your life. As a verb, it was much the same in terms of literal and figurative, but in a different way. One was to physically keep steady an object or the other was comparing the value of one thing to another.
The definition that I’m interested in is the figurative noun version. Having the correct proportions of elements in my life. Work vs. play, healthy eating vs. indulging, movement vs. rest, and so on. I find this definition in particular the hardest to accomplish. There are so many things in life to balance. I know it’s not the same everywhere, but some of us live in a society that makes it difficult to achieve that balance because the culture is focused on certain values and qualities that create an imbalance. Like, all work and no play existence. What’s especially challenging is if it’s even considered a disadvantage or weakness to lend more attention to the other aspects of your life. I’m noticing a slight shift in this way of thinking (for the better), but there’s still some more acceptance needed to normalize the concept of living a balanced life.
I’ve spent a good amount of my life trying to achieve balance, always going too far to one side mentally, physically, and emotionally, which I can attribute some of it to societal pressure and a lot on the pressure I put on myself. However, life has a funny way of guiding you in the direction of what you are trying to achieve. What’s interesting is that it’s not always what you want. Just like the Rolling Stones song, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need.” That rang true in my case.
I’ve often sought out ways to achieve inner peace, and there’s been some pretty defining moments that eventually revealed its intention for that, despite my disdain for the path it led me down. For instance, many years prior I embarked on a life change by leaving the place where I was born and raised, which is a huge metropolis of about nine million people, and moved to a small fishing village with a population of 200 to live closer to my then fiancée, who is now my husband of 12 years. It was devastating. I never knew what culture shock was until I made that move and lived there for eight months. It was extremely challenging to adjust and adapt to something so different for me. But, looking back it made total sense for what I wanted. What an ideal environment to focus on myself and find that quietness within. I had always thought of myself as a city girl while I lived there and maybe for a few years after I moved, but I never really felt like it fit right. Like I fit. Turns out that a slower pace of life, around an abundance of nature and a laid-back culture was the perfect fit for me. And that’s what I live in now despite my resistive beginnings. It was here that I could achieve that balance. Balance of mind, body, and emotional wellness.
A xo
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