Finding Balance

I think we can all agree that maintaining balance is important, but the struggle to find balance in our daily life, is real. This is about a possible solution to finding balance. I hope you will find this post encouraging.

In my case, everybody needs something from me: my children, my husband, my work, my students, my home…. There are picky mouths to feed, people to love and take care of, friends to see, stacks of marking that need meaningful feedback for my students, birthdays to plan, bathrooms, floors, and a kitchen that need to be cleaned, laundry to be washed, an empty fridge that needs to be filled from three different grocery stops, all the while, I need to find time to eat and wash my hair. For many years, I used to feel guilty for being so busy. I would read, almost obsessively, about managing stress. I felt like I had a problem and that I wasn’t living The Right Way. The Good Way.

I would read articles about maintaining a daily balance and find tips like: sleep for 8hrs, go to sleep by 10pm, reduce the hours of time you work, sit down for thirty minutes when you eat, chew slower, take smaller bites, put your fork down between mouthfuls, find time to meditate, to go on dates, to see friends. But every day, by the time I was finished feeding my family and then ready for the next school day, I would be exhausted and ready for sleep. I would go to bed feeling disappointed in myself because I had been so busy and not maintained a “good balance.” In the end, every tip for maintaining balance that I read, felt like it was one more item added to my endless “to-do” list and weighed me down.

One day, I was walking, thinking about how I never seem to maintain a good daily balance. As usual, I was thinking about how I had too many things to do and, as usual, I was also looking at the trees on my walk and admiring their beauty. It was a sunny day in early spring, and at this particular time, all the cherry blossoms were just coming into bloom. I felt like I was walking through a fairytale. The world was budding all around me and new life pulsed with energy from every direction. The excitement poking up from the earth was palpable. All of creation was singing the end of winter. I was lost in the beauty of the trees and the earth in spring. My mind drifted to imagining the trees in a few more weeks when they would be in full bloom. I thought about how all of their energy right now was going into that moment. Every hour of the day, there was no time for resting, only building, growing, expanding, opening.

From a young age, I’ve always felt a strong personal connection with trees, especially broad-leafed trees. Connection to a point where I actually feel like I’m part tree sometimes. I considered the life of my friends, the trees, in that moment. I thought about how they were also in a moment where there was no rest, just like me. Yet, they didn’t feel guilty for not being “in balance”. They were going for it! It was spring, that what’s what you do! You don’t rest! You give it all you’ve got! There’s no shame in that!

My thoughts moved toward summer, when these friends, my mentors, would push their roots deep and stretch tall. Drinking in water and sunlight, they would become stronger and rooted, yielding great fruit.

I started to think about how, I too, have seasons. At the start of the school year, it takes every ounce of energy in me to get my classroom and family up and running for the school year. Everyone’s needs looked after. Everyone taken care of, including myself. Everyone deserves to become the best they can be and I need to do my best to facilitate that. I thought about the winter months teaching, which reminded me of the trees in the summer. In the Winter, my classroom and family hums. We grow strong. We are comfortable in our busy routine of learning and growing. Our roots go deep, especially over winter break with family time. Strong, rooted, and yielding fruit, just like the trees in summer.

In Autumn, when the sun starts to loose its strength and the colder winds come to visit, I thought about the trees. They too, are busy. With satisfaction of a job well done –flowering, growing, and fruiting as much as possible –they are now busy letting go. In a breathtaking array of colours and styles, they prepare for rest. Again, my thoughts returned to my own new way of looking at balance. I realized that in that moment while I was on my walk in spring, that I was like the trees in the fall. Here I was, running around, preparing everything so that the end of the year would wrap up with no loose ends. I too was preparing to let go. My students were turning their most beautiful colours yet, and soon, I would let them go. It is important to me, every year, that the letting go is done well, just like the initial start up, and the growth throughout the year. The end of the school year, is beautiful. I want myself and my students to look back on a job well done, on a good year. I saw that it’s okay to be busy with wrapping up and letting go because in a few months would be summer, a time for great rest.

Many years ago someone mentioned to me that one of the reasons that our forests are stressed is because the winters hadn’t been cold enough for a few years in a row and that the trees weren’t able to rest deep enough or long enough to face the growth of the year ahead. Many of us consider Spring as the start of the seasons, but when I considered the wisdom of the trees and how they set aside months to rest and rest deep, I saw the connection between rest and growth. Much of the growth in Spring and Summer actually depend on the amount of rest leading up to that point. There is no beginning. It’s a cycle.

And so with gratitude, I realized that I too, get to rest. I am thankful to be a teacher and that I get to live the seasons of the trees. With the gift of winter, I am respectful of my summer vacation and I am careful to protect that time now. It is a time of great rest for myself and my children. We make no plans. We completely dial down to our sources of sustenance: resting well, sleeping in, spending time together, swimming in the ocean, watching sunsets, camping, spending as much time close to trees and around fires as possible. We rest from the growth behind us. We rest for the growth ahead of us. We rest. And we feel no guilt in that because we know, we are in balance and living a good way. I am thankful that I no longer need to feel guilty about what my balance looks like and that it doesn’t resemble the balance mentioned in trendy magazine articles. I live as the trees live.

References: Sadly I lost many of my beautiful tree photos when I recently fried the hard drive that stored all of my pics. These ones were uploaded with permission from www.unsplash.com.