Daily Om Thursday

Posted on January 8, 2015 by Lydia | 4 Comments

Balance (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Balance

Like pieces of a puzzle, the many different aspects of your being come together to form the person that you are. You work and play, rest and expend energy, commune with your body and soul, exalt in joy, and feel sorrow. Balance is the state that you achieve when all of the aspects of your life and self are in harmony. Your life force flows in a state of equilibrium because nothing feels out of sync. While balance is necessary to have a satisfying, energetic, and joyful life, only you can determine what balance means to you.

Achieving balance requires that you assess what is important to you. The many demands of modern life can push us to make choices that can put us off balance and have a detrimental effect on our habits, relationships, health, and career. In creating a balanced lifestyle, you must ascertain how much time and energy you are willing to devote to the different areas of your life. To do so, imagine that your life is a house made up of many rooms. Draw this house, give each part of your life its own room, and size each room according to the amount of importance you assign to that aspect of your life. You can include family, solitude, activities that benefit others, healthy eating, indulgences, exercise and working on self. You may discover that certain elements of your life take up an inordinate amount of time, energy, or effort and leave you with few resources to nurture the other aspects of your life. You may want to spend less time on these activities and more on the ones that! fulfill you.

A balanced lifestyle is simply a state of being in which one has time and energy for obligations and pleasures, as well as time to live well and in a gratifying way. With its many nuances, balance can be a difficult concept to integrate into your life. Living a balanced existence, however, can help you attain a greater sense of happiness, health, and fulfillment. ~ Madyson Taylor, Daily Om

In a perfect world, our lives would militate towards balance, so that we have ample time for all the joys of life. However, achieving balance requires us to make decisions based on how we envision a balanced life. As the Daily Om article notes, there are many aspects of our lives. Each serve to satisfy our physical, emotional, spiritual or mental needs.

As an initial matter, let’s agree that the aspects of a balanced quality of life amounts to 100% of our time. In order to create such a life, we must assign to each aspect, the percentage of time that we wish to devote to it. It goes without saying that a happy, satisfying life consists of a combination of aspects that are important and pleasing to us. The notion of what makes up a “balanced” quality of life is not uniform and varies from one person to another. I may select an aspect that is important to me, that wholly lacks meaning to you.

Two aspects of a balanced life that are extremely important are “work” and “play.” For most of us, the largest percent of our day is in work mode, be it a stay-at-home Mom or Dad, in public or private sector jobs, or those who simply keep themselves busy going from one task to another. By over emphasizing work, we neglect other areas of our lives, especially play.

Google defines “play” as to “engage in activity for enjoyment and recreation rather than a serious or practical purpose.” A researcher in a NPR (National Public Radio) story titled “Play Doesn’t End With Childhood: Why Adults Need Recess Too,” defined it as “something done for its own sake…. It’s voluntary, it’s pleasurable, it offers a sense of engagement, it takes you out of time. And the act itself is more important than the outcome.”

When we were children, no one needed to remind us to play. The phrase “can I go out and play?” was a common refrain. It seemed innate to our child persona. The word “play.” in and of itself brings a smile to my face, as I think of all the time that we spent simply having fun, and being the very opposite of serious. As children, our world revolved around play, and we attacked it with gusto. The possibilities for play were endless and it never occurred to us that when we “grew up,” play would take a back seat to work, and in some cases, totally forgotten. In addition to its health benefits, play promotes, among other things, curiosity, creativity, connection and keeping the mind sharp. (In case you are interested, can read here about the nonprofit National Institute for Play.)

Anyway, my point is to urge you not to discount “play” as a vital part of an ideal and balanced quality of life. In our work life, where we typically must display a serious persona, and is driven by outcome, outcome, outcome, play serves as a much-needed outlet to let go and show our goofy, fun and relaxing side. Why? Just because ….

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Quote Tuesday

Posted on January 6, 2015 by Lydia | Leave a comment



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“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.” ~ Gilda Radner

Creative Writing Saturday

Posted on January 3, 2015 by Lydia | 2 Comments



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One Almost Might

Wouldn’t you say,
Wouldn’t you say: one day,
With a little more time or a little more patience, one might
Disentangle for separate, deliberate, slow delight
One of the moment’s hundred strands, unfray
Beginnings from endings, this from that, survey
Say a square inch of the ground one stands on, touch
Part of oneself or a leaf or a sound (not clutch
Or cuff or bruise but touch with finger-tip, ear-
Tip, eyetip, creeping near yet not too near);
Might take up life and lay it on one’s palm
And, encircling it in closeness, warmth and calm,
Let it lie still, then stir smooth-softly, and
Tendril by tendril unfold, there on one’s hand.” ~ A. S. J. Tessimond

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Make Yourself A Priority

Posted on January 2, 2015 by Lydia | 5 Comments



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How often do you rush home from work or an errand, walk into the house, and without stopping to take a moment for yourself, head to the kitchen to cook dinner, to the dining room table to help the kids with homework, to the laundry room to wash a load of clothes, to the bathroom to fix that leaky faucet, to the home office to finish that pile of work, or anyone of the endless tasks on our ‘must do” list. Most of us tend to put others first, and should there be any time left, (which there never is) we’ll throw ourselves a bone. Our society promotes this behavior.

If you watch television, how often do you get the message that taking care of your self takes a back seat to other obligations. In our society, for far too many of us, a hot bubble bath, a pick-up basketball game or a massage, is a luxury. For those old enough to remember, who can forget the tag line “Calgon, take me away.” Our lives are so consumed with work or caring for others, that the idea of a simple bubble bath is a luxury that we can’t afford the time to indulge. We are bombarded with the implication that caring for, and meeting the expectations of others is enough to satisfy our own physical, mental, emotional or spiritual needs. Well, I am here to tell you, that is a lie.

If you’ve ever flown on a plane and bothered to listen to the flight attendant’s spiel about what you should do in an emergency (I know, I know, I usually tune them out, too.), you’d learn that those instructions offer some wisdom about the importance of self-care.

At some point during the ‘presentation,’ they arrive at the topic of the oxygen masks. (I promise that this will make sense very soon.) They demonstrate what you should do, if the mask is released. As they demonstrate, they make it a point to say that if you are traveling with a child, someone “acting” like a child, or anyone who requires your help, it is important that the first thing you do, is to put on your own mask.

Now to some, this sounds down right counter-intuitive and wrong. They frown upon putting themselves first, and believe that one should place the mask on their loved one, before worrying about themselves. The thing is this, if you don’t take care of yourself first, by affixing your own mask, will you be in any condition to care for your loves or others to whom you are obligated? Who will be there to care for them in your absence, should you succumb to oxygen deprivation or worse? In order to care for others, you must first, care for yourself. This simple idea is applicable in so many areas of our lives, and applies to all of us.

Whether you are a parent, a care giver, single, married, or married to your job, the same applies. Engaging in self-care acknowledges your self-worth and compassion. More and more often, life requires us to care for a seriously ill child, parent, grandparent, another relative, or even a friend. In most cases, professional long-term care is cost prohibitive, so the burden falls on the family to assume that role. Committing to the care of our whole selves, is not a luxury, but a necessity. Instead of it being self-indulgent, it is plain common sense.

Moreover, self-care need not cost a dime, and it differs from person to person. It can come in many forms, such as, reading a chapter in a book, meditation, yoga, an hour at the gym, daydreaming at the nearby coffee shop, quiet time, or taking a stroll on the beach. The possibilities are endless. Granted, at first, it may take some effort to craft the time for yourself, but in the end, it is worth it, because you are worth it.

This is not meant to promote shirking your responsibilities and/or adopting the “me first” philosophy. No, there are times when we must cede our own needs to those of others. The idea is to carve out some time, no matter how much, during which, you can re-enervate yourself, by yourself. Thereafter, you can resume your other responsibilities, less harried, calmer and with a more positive attitude. It’s a win-win for all concerned.

Now, where did I put that number for the massage therapist?