Balancing Act
It's seems so perfectly Zen, to say that one has achieved balance. The closest I have ever come to balance in my life in any sense is the tale end of my New York life when I could pay my bills on time and still afford to buy a drink at the theater bar during intermission. It's such an overwhelming and exhausting task to find a point in your life when the good and the bad aren't jockeying for position but instead sitting side by side without one feeling jealous that the other has a leg up. It almost seems cliche at this point to blame it on my severe case of the mid-twenties, then again, it also seems so easy and so accurate. I'm supposed to feel this off-kilter, this uneasy and anxious. But aren't these supposed to be the "best year's of my life?" Or was that senior year of high school? I forget. Actually, I don't think I ever knew.

I'm eating too much and excercising too little. I'm being financially frugal yet not making any money to reinflate the draining budget. I'm close to my family again but spend all day alone. I am awake in plenty of time to watch Oprah but sleep too late to catch Ellen.

Balance, it is obviously missing.

I have always imagined forty to be my perfect year. The age at which all grown-up things would be realized and the balance of life would be somewhat secure. I would have a husband, perhaps a child and a job. No, not a job, a career. My girlfriends and I would take vacations together to reconnect and send cards on birthdays and holidays with cute pictures of flowers or young girls playing dress up who remind us of our childhoods, the inside flap filled with words of wisdom from those who have managed to find balance. But forty is still fifteen years away. That's a lot of time to spend pondering your stay in limbo.

That's why I am trying to figure it out now. I'm working on balancing the stress with the carefree, the yeses with the no ways and the possibilities with the may-be-possible-laters. I still catch myself feeling envious or jealous of those I know who seem to have a handle on the balancing act. I think it's pretty natural to wish that our lives were like theirs or, at the very, least that their lives were much more like ours.

So I'm not really anywhere close to being blissful in my own balance, I'm all adrift without one of those little donut things to hold on to. But I'm working on it, and that task in itself is a lesson in the beauty of balance.