Balance

 

By Stephanie Stamm

 

In preparation for the new year and in the spirit of New Year’s resolutions, I’ve been thinking a lot about balance.

Webster’s defines “balance” as

• the state of having your weight spread equally so that you do not fall;
• the ability to move or to remain in a position without losing control or falling;
• a state in which different things occur in equal or proper amounts or have an equal or proper amount of importance.

All of those definitions fit together, don’t they? When we are out of balance, we feel like we might fall; when our lives are out of balance, they (or we) feel like we might fall apart.

As I’ve thought about this post, I’ve pictured images of a seesaw…

or a scale.

We have so many things to balance in our lives. Work and play, sleeping and waking, family and friends, and for many of us writers, day job and writing. In fact, the seesaw and balance seem a little too limited with only two ends. We might better think about juggling multiple items…

or apportioning the pieces of a pie chart.

It’s very easy for certain aspects of our lives to get out of balance. Maybe we work too much. Maybe we don’t spend enough time with our family. Maybe we don’t work on our writing enough. Maybe we neglect to exercise. We can convince ourselves that we’ll find that balance later, when things settle down, when we have more time, or fewer balls to juggle.

But I’ve been thinking about how we get this one gift of a life—and I’m finding that waiting until later to find balance doesn’t seem like such a good idea. Life isn’t happening later. Life is happening now. Now seems like a good time to get those pieces in order.

So, that’s one of my goals for the new year. To find a sense of balance in all the pieces-parts of life that I want to fit together. I’m tired of tipping from one end of the seesaw to the other. I don’t want to weigh my life in the balance and find important pieces wanting.

Are there particular things you want to balance in the new year? What, if any, resolutions have you made?

 

Seesaw 1902:  By Chicago Daily News [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Apothecary’s Balance:  http://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/obf_images/d0/34/bc8d768fcbdc7f534addba91f0b5.jpg [CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

 

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I am the author of the New Adult/Young Adult urban fantasy series, The Light-Bringer:

 

I have also contributed stories (one fictional and one true) to the following volumes: