Finding the lessons in the chaos
"Life is a balance between what we can control and what we cannot. I am learning to live between effort and surrender."--Danielle Orner
These past few weeks have been weeks of total unbalance for me. The “busy” of the holiday season and the inevitable curveballs of life have sort of taken over. Just this week, my poor dog was injured when he was attacked by 2 other dogs while I was walking him, my clothes washer broke down as I’m trying to do laundry to get ready to travel, and my younger daughter became ill in the midst of an influenza outbreak at her school (she does not have the flu, luckily). This all happens while we are trying to get ready to travel for a family wedding—in which my coughing, feverish girls are flower girls—this weekend and then the holiday right after. It is absolutely nuts! Quite literally there are moments when I am not sure whether to laugh or to cry because I can’t believe all that is going on right now. I am feeling stressed, disorganized, and a bit overwhelmed by responsibilities and unwanted surprises. I very frequently find myself rather impatiently looking into the future when I may be able to find my grounding again.
My colleague Phoebe, who is having an eerily similar holiday season, and I have taken to texting each other “Just. Can’t. Make. This. Up.” as code for when something new has come up. We both are truly in that “survival-just do it because it has to be done” mode. I’m sure you can relate. There are times in our lives that feel almost surreal because we just have that much going on, and the hits just keep coming. During these times the things we need often begin to fall of the overflowing plate. I can tell you that I haven’t been able to fit in any of my practices in any consistent way for the past few weeks. I’ve had to accept sporadic bits and pieces and find ways to tolerate the discomfort of the chaos.
What comes to mind today, besides the reminder to just breathe, is something that one of my yoga instructors once said during a class. She said that we are often searching for balance, but there is a lot of wisdom in the unbalance. This really resonates with me today as I sit with my chaos and try to sort through it. Perhaps I need to just sit with my chaos and allow it to be here. It is anyways, whether I accept it or not, so why struggle with it? If I can shift my focus from finding and achieving balance in the future to allowing unbalance to be here and finding the wisdom in it, perhaps I can learn something about myself, about what I need, about which of my roots needs attention and love.
The wisdom in the unbalanced teaches us that these periods of feeling off, of feeling ungrounded, unbalanced, not rooted--these experiences are important to embrace. They hold lessons and help us evolve. Our resistance to these lessons creates only suffering and more unbalance, while our acceptance cultivates our roots and creates the balance we unsuccessfully try to force.
Furthermore, if we can find ways to practice amidst all of the chaos, we are engaging in the “meditation of life itself”, as Jon Kabbat-Zin calls it. I may be paraphrasing what he actually said, but the gist of it is that going through our daily lives offers us unlimited opportunities to practice mindfulness and awareness. Whenever we can manage a stressful situation by acknowledging and being aware of the discomfort of the stress, breathing through it, and accepting it for what it is, we are practicing mindfulness. And we are managing the stress in a healthy and effective way.
Today let us shift our focus away from the pursuit of balance, of groundedness, of rootedness, which exists in the future and takes us out of the moment. Let’s rather focus our efforts toward embracing those times when we do not feel balanced, together, rooted. My guess is there are many of them these days, so we probably have quite a few opportunities to practice this today. There is much to learn about ourselves and our needs through our awareness, acceptance, and attentiveness to the unbalance. And there are so many opportunities to use our crazy daily lives to practice mindfulness. Let’s not waste them!
"My life is thus and so, and will continue thus and so. And why fight it? My balance comes from instability." --Saul Bellow