Striking A Balance

I have a problem, and my problem is that I am passionate about too many things. If I like something, I really like it, and I want to be good at it and do it all the time. Luckily, I like my work and my job (phew!), but I also really like sewing, reading, blogging, singing, yoga,…shopping… And herein lies the issue – how do I strike a balance between all the things I like doing and want to do all the time, while still fitting in time to sleep, do Brownies, clean the house, see friends and family, watch Midsomer Murders?!

Well, the answer is that I don’t. I can get very overwhelmed when I have too much to do – my breakdowns often involve me crying on the floor while uttering: “Too much, too much!” I don’t have time to do all these things at the same time so things have to move and shift. And at the moment, I’ve managed to strike quite a good balance that is working right for me. But it’s a delicate balance that can get easily thrown off if something new comes into the mix.
What I tend to do nowadays is let one thing slip for a bit while I work on one thing, then I go back to it at a later date. Like I said, it’s a fine balance so that I don’t lose what I’ve been working on. For example, outfit photos on the blog have subsided recently to make way for other posts, and even those other posts have subsided because, for that period of time, I wanted to spend more of my energy on reading, or on sewing, or on yoga. But the problem is that, with blogging, readers can disappear, followers can slip, if you’re not spending time working on it. Likewise, if I let yoga slip for too long, I’ll get weaker and no longer have the strength or flexibility to jump straight back in where I left off.

The way that my brain works is by having goals. Pretty much everything I do will have a goal. My goal with reading is obvious – my Goodreads challenge for the year, and the past two years I’ve, very annoyingly, not managed to reach my goal due to other commitments. With yoga, my goal is to become stronger and healthier – there are certain poses that I want to be able to master and there are things you can easily measure, like how much more flexible I’m getting. My goals with sewing are more short term in completing certain garments, but if I don’t sew often enough, I worry that my skills are slipping.

And believe it or not, but there are even more things that I’d love to do but just don’t have the time! Ben and I like to cook together, but we don’t often do big or fancy meals because we’re pressed for time because of work and the short amount of time we have on evenings. I want to write more than just a few blogs (as in, I’ve always wanted to be an author, like forever) – I have drafts, plans, ideas, but none of them have had the chance to come to fruition yet because they’re on constantly on the back burner. I’m currently not doing choir because, again, evenings are so short.

It’s all about balancing it, and at the moment I’m so lucky to be able to fit in time and to have the energy to do the things I want to do, because it hasn’t always been this way, and it very likely won’t always be this way – things change and you have to be ready for that. So right now, I’m appreciating and am grateful for the fact that I am able to enjoy doing what I enjoy.

PS: The toadstool has nothing whatsoever to do with this post, except perhaps the fact that Brownies is one of the things I do that I have to strike a balance with. And I just really wanted to show off the toadstool we made in our last meeting – we had an old wooden one that got thrown out (sob!) over the summer holidays because our hall was being redone and they thought it was rubbish! Nevertheless, we banded together on our Promise Night on Wednesday and our pack created this toadstool between – impressed? I was!