As you are me and we are all together

This is part three of a three-part blog. You can find part one here and part two here. The motivation for this was reading the book Eat Pray Love which, as I've discussed with other people, everyone gets something different out of. I could not recommend this book more.

Part three is about balance. Ms Gilbert travels to Bali to try and balance her search for pleasure in Italy with her search for God in India. My brain took it a different way.

Recently, more and more actually, I’ve been thinking about the balance in my own life. Finding a perfect balance that will keep me happy and healthy is quite the task, considering that perfection is unattainable. But lately, it’s been a bit of a struggle.

I’m trying to balance the part of me that wants to be super healthy and eat only foods that are good for me and work out six days a week and stay trim and fit with the part of me that thinks doughnuts and Starbucks is an appropriate lunch, with two servings of guacamole for dinner.

I’m working on balancing the part of me that is struggling with working for an evil corporate giant versus the part of me that really likes that evil corporate giant paycheck that shows up every two weeks.

There’s the balance I’m trying to attain between an adult who puts aside as much money as possible for her retirement versus the twenty-something who is working on living in the moment and experiencing all that life has to offer while there is nothing holding her back.

Or the balance I’m trying to find knowing that my job is in St Louis yet the majority of friends are not. This is a hard one, one that makes me more sad than most things on a daily basis. Do I leave a city I love and a well-paying job for less financial certainty but the guarantee of a circle of people who love me? Or do I push through it until I’m more financially stable so then I can really go wherever I damn well please?

As silly as it sounds, I have to work on balancing my love of baseball with my love of hockey. How do I get excited about one while the other is still going on? This season, it doesn’t look like it will be a big deal, until hockey playoffs show up around the same time as the beginning of the baseball season. Dilemma, that is.

In two weeks, I’ll be getting on a plane to Baltimore to go meet my, at that time, one-month-old nephew. His mother, my sister, is nine months younger than me (she’s my stepsister). Last Friday afternoon I went over to visit my friend Scary Spice so I could meet her one-month-old daughter. Scary Spice is a year and a half younger than I am. Both of these women are married and have kids, and here I am, less than two months from turning 26 with neither of these things in sight. I sat there, snuggling Scary Spice’s little frog as she fell asleep on my belly, and it made me wonder. Did I take the right path? Any of the mothers I know, when they look at their children, their eyes fill with wonderment and the purest love I’ve ever had the privilege of seeing. And it makes me wonder if I’m missing out. I realize that there is a LOT of time left, being that I am so young. But as strange as it is, I can hear that biological clock ticking. It isn’t loud, and I can push it out of my head, but it pops up in my dreams all the time, and then it sits there and goes “this could be you” while a tiny infant is snoring into my chest.

Balance is difficult. Attaining that inner peace in an increasingly peace-less world is something worth striving for, but I suppose like everything else worth having, there will be a lot of hard work necessary to get it.

Maybe that’s the point of life in general. Maybe perfect balance is an impossible goal, but working towards it every single day is what we’re supposed to be doing, what will give us fulfillment.

Either way, I think then that right here, right now, this is what’s right for me. That my path is not someone else’s path, nor should I look at anyone else and think it’s for me. It’s my job to move forward and do what I’m meant to, not what someone else is.

I’m fine in the fire

I feed on the friction

I’m right where I should be

Don’t try and fix me