Against BALANCE..
You will find this piece interesting and insightful.
"Against BALANCE..
Dear Ones -
The other night at my event in St Paul, a young woman asked me about how I achieve balance in my life.
First of all, I love that she thinks I have achieved balance in my life!
Secondly, I felt the need to speak out once more against the subtle
tyranny of the word BALANCE, which I think haunts and punishes modern
women more and more every day.
We are constantly being told that
we should be achieving balance — that we should somehow exquisitely be
negotiating the relationships between our work lives, our home lives,
our romantic lives, our health and well-being, our spiritual selves.
You
can't read an interview with a famous woman these days that the
journalist does not applaud her for having achieved BALANCE....and then
if you turn the pages of that magazine, you will find ten more articles
showing how you can achieve balance. too!
Be careful.
The
word BALANCE has tilted dangerously close, I fear, to the word PERFECT —
another word that women use as weapons against themselves and each
other.
To say that someone has found the secret to a balanced
life is to suggest that they have solved life, and that they now float
through their days in a constant state of grace and ease, never
suffering stress, ambivalence, confusion, exhaustion, anger, fear, or
regret.
Which is a wonderful description of nobody, ever.
Balance, when we do find it, is a breathtakingly temporary condition.
We
stand upon a world that spins at 2000 miles an hour. Our minds,
meanwhile, spin at 200,000 miles an hour.
We collide every day with
other humans who are also sliding and spinning wildly. The landscape of
our lives, therefore, changes by the minute.
You find your balance one
day and think, "Hooray! I have solved it" and then five minutes later
the world utterly transforms again, and you're knocked on your ass one
more time.
That's just how life is on this planet — messy, fast,
out of control, unpredictable. It's all terribly interesting, but also
terribly unstable.
That being the case, I dropped the myth of
BALANCE a long time ago. (I buried it right next to PERFECT.)
My life
seems happiest — as I tried to explain to this young woman the other
night — when I just surrender to the madness, and embrace the glorious
mess that I am...and also when I embrace the glorious mess that everyone
else is, and the glorious mess of the world itself.
My life gets the
most painful when I try to set the entire mess (myself, other people,
life itself) into order.
The world is like a dropped pie most of
the time. Don't kill yourself trying to put it back together. Just grab
a fork and eat some of it off the floor. Then carry on.
If you
can get some stuff done in the chaos sometimes, god bless you.
If you
can basically hold it together, propping yourself up with duct tape and
glue, rock on.
If you can manage stay upright even one hour a day,
you're doing pretty great, as far as I'm concerned.
And if you can be
kind to the other stumbling fools around you half the time — well,
that's just heroic.
Basically, I think we are all just sloppy stupendous champions.
Onward!
Heart,
LG"
LG"
NB: This is a Facebook post by Elizabeth Gilbert: https://www.facebook.com/GilbertLiz/
Do you feel the same way as Elizabeth? Your thoughts?
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