I often hear people saying how they want to achieve “balance” in their lives, a blissful state where everything is equal calm and easy. While this sounds like lovely idea to me it doesn’t accurately reflects life.
If had been trying to achieve balance there is no way I would have been able to organize the Mustard Seed extreme makeover. I was totally out of balance. I was full bore, 100% focused. Totally committed. Over the months leading up the event I kept cutting things out of my life: TV, entertainment, and leisure. I cut out my weekly journal sessions. I cut out calling my family, my friends, and going to the gym. I even cut out working at the restaurant. In the end if it wasn’t makeover related it was pretty much out.
Was I or much of my team in balance? Certainly not. Was it the right thing to do? Certainly was.
This idea of balance doesn’t really exist. In life everything is in constant motion, in constant flux and unfoldment. There are at every moment various levels of ebb and flow.
For my mind the word “balance” isn’t accurate. Instead substitute the word “harmony.”
A harmonious life can sometime appear unbalanced. Sometimes you’re in total action, sometimes in total rest, sometimes your somewhere in between. What’s important is that your life resonates an overall harmony.
There was the pinnacle of the extreme makeover, a crazy intense flood, a beautiful impactful all-encompassing time. Afterwards has come an ebb, where things slow down, where the intensity slackens. Many confuse this for depression, but it is merely the natural course of things.
The trick is to embrace the entire gamut of life, the ebb and the flow, the calm and the storm, the big moment and the little moment.
While the ebb might not be exciting, it’s a blessing to call my family and hang out with old (and new) friends. It’s a blessing to get back to the gym and have some self-reflective time.
The flood will come again–of that I am sure.
