Every day of every week I’m constantly trying to find the perfect balance between marriage, motherhood, career and personal goals. I recently wrote in a different post that some weeks I feel like I’m gliding across a balance beam gracefully without falter. While other weeks I can barely get one foot in front of the other without falling flat on my face and bringing everything down with me. The truth is, finding a balance is hard. Really hard. And the more I try to consistently find it, the more I seem to lose it and get thrown off course.
Then a few weeks ago I stumbled upon an article about tilting towards life instead of balancing. It really inspired me to start changing my outlook a bit. The article described that some people are throwing the whole balancing life act out the window, and they’re tilting instead. Meaning, wherever the day or the week is taking them, they follow it and put their effort where it needs to be knowing the next day or the next week they’ll probably be tilting in an entirely different direction.
The article went on to describe that it’s impossible to consistently find a perfect balance all the time, and that instead of stressing over it, perhaps it’s best to just go with the flow so to speak. The article really made an impact on how I’ve looked at my life the past few weeks, and instead of trying to perfect my balancing act every day, I’ve been striving to just lean wherever the day or the week is leading me.
Take this weekend… My husband and daughter left yesterday morning to go skiing, as he really wanted to get one more day out on the slopes before the season ends. But I stayed home, because quite frankly you guys, I’m ready for spring and I just wasn’t feeling it. It’s not at all that I didn’t want to be with them; I was sad and missed them as soon as they left, but I was given the opportunity to have some time to myself and it’s what I felt like I needed. So I reminded myself that I was simply leaning towards where life was taking me for the weekend – which was taking advantage of some free time for me. So here I am, sitting at my kitchen table on a Sunday morning, by myself in my quiet house writing this post and drinking a hot cup of peppermint tea while my husband is away skiing with our baby girl enjoying some daddy daughter time.
You see tomorrow my life will tilt me right back to my jam-packed Monday schedule of motherhood, training clients and teaching classes. It probably won’t be perfectly balanced and it will definitely come with the chaos of hustling from one place to the next hoping to get to each destination on time, but that’s OK – I’m going to just follow where the day leads me. Tuesday is a totally different schedule, which means it’ll tilt me in an entirely different direction, and Wednesday will be even more different… so on and so forth.
I’m learning that I simply can’t balance every little thing I do perfectly every single day. I need to instead, just go with the flow more, and learn to let a few things drop to the floor while I’m busy carrying out whatever is on my plate for that day, knowing that I’ll pick up my other responsibilities and priorities later.
So my point is, maybe life isn’t about balancing all the time. Maybe it’s more about tilting, and focusing our energy wherever it needs to be each day. All the while finding gratification knowing you don’t have to glide across the beam anymore because you’re leaning towards life, zigzagging in all its many different directions and following all the beautiful and crazy adventures it has in store for you.