Food for thought going into 2016
You know that awkward stage we all hit around the age of twelve? Where our bodies are disproportionate, our arms seem to be longer than our legs and our legs longer than our bodies and our bodies shorter than our necks while our heads just don’t seem to fit anywhere? Sometimes I feel just like that. The funny part is I’m forty-five and it’s actually starting to become true again. It seems to be coming at the right time for me though, I’ve just been reminded how necessary balance really is in our lives. How our habitual imbalance in our youth plays out into our mid-life and I am almost positive it carries us right on through to the age of confusion.
Life really does bring us full circle, something I never truly understood until this year. I always felt like I had it all together, always striving to fit the bill so I would be able to make the bills. It didn’t quite work though, there was always something missing or ‘out-of-whack’.
In the beginning, I had some sort of misconception that balance had something to do with everything working out my way and going smoothly and when it didn’t I figured it had to do with the ‘idiot’ who chose to cancel their appointment without notice and so I devised even tighter guidelines for setting up and canceling appointments. Eventually the price for cancelling was the death penalty and ‘I just wouldn’t do business with them anymore’. Well, you all see where this is going. I hope you do.
The point is, it took some time for me to realize, unlike the great balances of the justice system, we have three scales to balance. Our physical needs, emotional needs and spiritual needs. Well, that was a revelation and a half. At the age of thirty I woke up wishing someone had told me that a long time beforehand. I mean it seemed easy enough. Right? “Uh-uh … nope.” I ran around for the next ten years trying to decipher what parts of my day fell into what particular scale and tried balancing all three scales that way. Kind of like realizing red wine goes great with both pork and beef. I found myself taking a bit more red wine to balance the scales and I think you see where this one is leading, I hope you do.
This past five years of life for me has brought on an even deeper revelation. We must take on this delicate balance from three directions, all from within! Wow, now we are getting somewhere. Yes, after having come through a three year spell of extreme and debilitating pain and the miraculous surgery I had prayed for finally happened, I now feel like I have a brand new head and a brand new body. Only to realize, I am still unbalanced.
You see, our thoughts and decisions are the food we eat. It is what essentially sustains us throughout our lives. With every thought and every decision there is going to be a percentage in us that is affected physically, emotionally and spiritually. Sometimes it’s really not about “how much” we are accomplishing but how much of us we are sacrificing in order to feel accomplished.
My financial answers no longer are allowed to add up to two or three jobs or working a total of fifty-sixty-seventy hours a week. My emotional answers are no longer allowed to contain a house full of people all laughing and screaming or crying just because I love my family so much. My spiritual answers are not allowed to contain more chapters and verses or church services either. Do I cut all three out entirely? Absolutely not. I do however, sacrifice less of myself in any one particular category because all three activities take away from the same. “Me”, and I am a physical, emotional and spiritual being. Not just one or two at any given moment. I am always all three.
So, perhaps the moral of this story is that in moving into the New Year and as we build our dreams and goals lists, we need to remember what is really important. Does pleasing our spouse, children, boss or friends make us happy? Of course it does, so does paying the bills and so does drinking red wine but too much pleasing of everyone around us to make us happy will do worse than get us drunk. It will wind us right into a frenzy. Take this bit of thought for food when deciding exactly what you want to experience in 2016. I’m sure your spouse, children, boss and friends will all be happy when they see how happy you are. God bless you all and May you have an enjoyable and merry holiday season!
Thanks....Adrienne
