It has been a crazy week. I traveled from a seminar in North Carolina to another seminar in Washington, D.C. That is finishing up today and tomorrow I head home. I will be very glad to be home again for a while. I do love to travel, but I also love sleeping in my own bed, so too much of one or the other makes me tired. Like many other things, the secret is in finding the right balance!
Finding the right balance is true for so many aspects of my life. The right balance between food and exercise; between sleep and being awake; between work and fun; between learning and teaching – the list goes on and on. Too much of any one thing is not good for us.
We thrive on diversity, but not on uncertainty. Uncertainty tends to make our “flight or flight” mechanisms kick in. We don’t know what to do or which way to go, so our adrenal glands go into overtime, and our survival instincts take over. Like if you are caught in a crosswalk with a speeding car bearing down on you. You don’t stop to think about your options for escape and which one is probably the most effective. Your adrenal glands kick in and you run! Without even thinking about it!
In the case of a speeding car, that is a life saving response. The problem is that our adrenal glands can’t tell the difference between a speeding car and an angry boss. Both seem life threatening to our emotional selves, so we go into hyper-drive in both cases. Since modern life gives us many opportunities to feel stress, we become adrenaline junkies – operating all day at hyper-stressed levels of activity. Eventually we burn out and find coping strategies – and at least for me, those strategies usually involve self-medicating with carbs to replace depleted energy reserves. And that creates an entirely new set of problems – with weight control and related health issues. Not fun!
But uncertainty is everywhere, so what are we supposed to do? I tend to think of it like one of those rides at a county fair. You know the ones where they are designed to whirl you and twirl you and spin you around until you get sick? Well, the secret to not getting sick is to pick one stable thing, something that you can control like your hand or your foot, and look at that, just that. When you do that, you don’t get sick. Just like they teach you in whirling Sufi dances, look at the palm of your hand. It’s stable, it moves with you, and it will keep you from getting off balance when everything else is spinning around.
Find something really stable in your life, something you know you can count on, and place your focus on that. There will still be plenty of uncertainty in the world, creating opportunities for you to spin out of control and lose your balance. But if you can just focus on one stable component of your life, you don’t have to lose your balance and get sick. Now you know the secret! Enjoy!