Balance

What do you do to find balance?

We all need balance in our lives. Some of us are better at finding it than others. I'll be honest - I'm not always the best at it.

So I'm trying to be better.

I'm trying to:

• eat better - do more meal planning, more veg, less crap

• drink more water

• do more exercise - more yoga, walking, even the odd use of the eliptical

• meditate once a day and practice mindfulness

• be kind to myself

• practice gratitude

Jeepers! That's quite a lot isn't it?

In midlife I've found that I sometimes get a bit hung up on all the things I should or could be doing. So it made me consider how do we maintain balance as we head into the holiday season? Mostly because I know that things go wonky, or at least they do for me! We socialise more - eat more, drink more, get a little less sleep. (I also celebrate my birthday and it all goes haywire).

So here are my very brief thoughts on keeping some balance during the holiday season. First of all - I think we need to agree to not beat ourselves up when we don't do everything we want to (or think that we should) do in a day. There's a lot to do in our everyday life, and we ramp it up over the holidays. As I used to say when I was working with people who were trying to quit smoking - "it's a lapse, not a collapse and it's ok". So, that bit of chocolate orange is ok, and if I don't get some activity in, it's ok. We can start again tomorrow. Or, to go a bit Anne of Green Gables - tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it (thanks to L.M. Montgomery for that wisdom). I firmly believe that we should embrace that thought.

That might be it actually. That might be the post. Don't beat yourself up about not having attained the perfect balance every day. Celebrate if you do achieve it, but don't expect to get it perfect every day. Every day it's going to be different. Isn't that a relief?

I find that one of the benefits of midlife is that I don't expect myself to get it right every day. Hell, I don't really expect myself to get it right once a week, and what other people think about it matters not. So, crack on with whatever you have to do. Do all the things that are good for you and find something good in every day.

(That was it. That was the post.)

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