We are frequently exhorted to find a balance in our lives – between work and leisure, frivolity and constructive engagement with community, outer focus on the world and inner focus on the state of our spirit/soul/divine essence, time with others and time alone, frugality and a splurge, etc etc etc as said my favorite Siamese king.
Without planning or choice on my part, I am faced with a weekly switch from solitude to encompassing family demands and back again, as my husband works in another community about 2 hours away, and his sons go to school there. Weekdays I am alone in our home, with various planned commitments that engage me with others, both casually as in grocery shopping for the family, and more intentionally as in participating in a book group, meetings with my spiritual community, and treatment appointments with providers whom I have worked with for so long that they have become friends. And of course phone calls and texting with my spouse and with other friends who live at a distance from my rural home.
Then comes the weekend and spouse and stepsons arrive to fill the house with chatter, chores, and much distracting energy. Some weeks it is a full weekend, Friday evening to Sunday evening, others it is scarcely 24 hours, from Saturday afternoon to Sunday afternoon, as the boys play in a soccer tournament that is held in yet another community than those of our split level weekday living arrangement. In either case, the weekends are always busy with necessary, but not necessarily planned, events. While there is an unwritten list of what needs to be done, much of it is tackled on impulse, prioritized by what we feel like taking on at any part of the day(s).
I can “go with the flow” of both quietly structured weekdays and seriously unquiet, impulse-driven weekends. The lesson I have yet to learn is how to be at ease with the transitions. I do often feel overwhelmed when “the guys” arrive and spill into the house, quickly taking much of the oxygen and filling the silence with chatter. By the time they leave I have adapted, and then with solitude restored, I feel almost bereft for at least a couple hours, unless or until someone calls, or I have a meeting to attend either in person or on line.
I have wondered if the transitions would feel less disruptive if my time alone and time in family were closer to equal? Or if I had a naturally more extroverted personality, allowing me to participate more fully and immediately in the family dynamic? Would it help for me to aim to become less of a planner and more of an impulse-driven person during my alone time? Or should I be working to impose more structure onto the weekends?
Unanswered (unanswerable?) questions that Mind busies itself trying to solve, until my Inner Self asserts its authority and turns to my spiritual guide who reminds me that Mind cannot solve Mind’s problems. And it is only Mind that considers the transitions to be disruptive and in need of a solution. True Self simply is. Present with whatever is happening, not attached to any way of being, appreciating each moment for what insights it offers. Mind tries to find balance, Inner Self is intrinsically balanced.
So the question is not how to negotiate the transitions, but who it is living them. Once the correct “who” is in charge, balance becomes automatic and the concept of transition vanishes.
How simple, when looked at rightly.
1eclecticwriter 