Feet off the Ground and You Let Go . . .

So I was on my exercise ball this morning, you know, trying not to fall off, and I started thinking about balance. Balance is a goal I work on with the ball . . . one that is very far from me at the moment. If my feet are off the floor, I still have to hold onto stuff or I will plummet to the floor. I can let go for a few seconds, but only a few. Though, those seconds are increasing every day.

Today, as I was in those moments when I've let go of everything, I realized that one of the reasons I lose my balance is because I over compensate. If I start to fall towards the right, I always shift hard towards the left....which puts me just as out of balance, if not more so.  Balance isn't about large shifts. It's about small, subtle movement. It's about understanding how to yield when you need to, how to shift when necessary.

And yeah, I'm going somewhere with this. See, trying to balance on this ball is kind of a metaphor for how I've lived most of my life. Feet off the ground, holding on to something, trying my best not to faceplant into the ground. And every time I was just brave enough to let go of whatever was holding me up, I would panic and overcompensate just as soon as things started to slide.

The overcompensation is always where the problems come in. As soon as I would react to my fear of falling, I would do something that just unraveled everything I'd accomplished in those few brief moments of bravery.

I don't really know HOW to balance.

It's one of those concepts I think most of us have a fairly good working theory about. We understand the concept and we comprehend the benefits.  We just don't know how to get there.

I also think that balance is something we look at wrong. I've been seeing it as some kind of eventual goal. "Oh when I do A and B and C -Y, I will have balance." I'm starting to suspect that the way to achieve more balance is to begin by getting a little bit of it, then just building on it. The more balance you have, the easier it is to get more.

For instance . . . I'm trying to find a nice balanced diet.  Not some crazy extreme thing, but something to where I eat enough to never feel deprived but not so much that I keep gaining weight. But to do this, my mind has to be in the right place about it. So, the more balanced my mind, the more balanced my diet. The more balanced my diet, the more balanced my hormones, which means the more even the chemical production, which means more balance to my mind. It begins to spiral into a better and better thing.

This is kind of awesome because usually my spiralling is bad.

Anyway, the balance thing is now one of those things I'm going to be thinking about a lot. It's a new place to start trying to build some strength. Bravery and balance. My new focus. Wow.