Weaving Progress

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”

— Albert Einstein

For most of us, the human experience is complicated; everyone I know has a love/hate relationship with life on this planet, in that we have things that we absolutely love to do, see, and enjoy…but we also have serious issues with some of the mechanics of how things and people here behave.  It takes a lot of effort to just go about one’s daily routine and take care of the items necessary to stay alive, and it can be extremely challenging at times (if not all the time) to find the space and energy to work and play the way we’d like to.  We’ve all had the experience of having things humming along in some semblance of balance, only to have several difficult things happen at once to break the rhythm and call us into a whole bunch of activity we weren’t expecting and didn’t want.  Devices break down.  People close to us have urgent needs, disappoint us, or even pass away.  World events change the course of our lives in ways that are frustrating at best or catastrophic at worst.  It’s a lot to balance, to say the least.

In order to carve out more of what makes all the effort seem worth it to you, there are things you can be doing along the way to make it easier to weather the next bout of challenge.  While your attention is being taken up by handling a crisis, the best you’re probably going to be able to do is to practice what you’ve already begun to establish, so these are things to have an eye on when your life is not at its most demanding.  They are worth working at as a long game, and let’s face it, if you’re alive, you’re never finished with these.  All of the factors that make up your life continually change, and there will always be a new balance to create, but the more skill you can build in each area, the more grace you’ll be able to draw from when you’re called upon to dig deep.  Here are the basic areas in which you might choose to focus in order to make progress when you have capacity:

Internal resources.  This is the world of factors that are more within your control, and it encompasses the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual:

·      The quality of the food you eat, the sleep you allow yourself, the exercise you get regularly

·      How well you express and manage your emotions, including through the use of tools such as Tapping/EFT

·      How well you manage the thoughts, relationships, and situations that give rise to those emotions

·      Your mental habits and discipline, and practices like meditation or journaling in which you grow in your understanding of and ability to manage your mind

·      Your general beliefs about yourself and the world

·      Your spiritual beliefs and practices

External resources, and your ability to handle interacting with them while maintaining your own equilibrium.  These are the factors that are not within your control:

·      Basic physics, the intrinsic properties of the world around us

·      The beliefs and actions of singular people

·      The opportunities available to you at any given time, your positioning in relationship to others and the whole

·      World events that are a product of mass movements—these by definition don’t start or end with one person

The areas in which you choose to grow will define your life in many ways.  You might choose to focus on an area in which you feel least functional in order to limit the lows you will experience going forward in that area.  You also might, as discussed in last week’s blog, focus on putting more energy into an area where you’re already skilled and passionate while finding ways to cooperate with others so that you don’t need to become expert in the areas that are hardest for you.  When you read through the bullets above, which areas seem most appropriate for your next round of efforts?  If you’ve read this far, you’re most likely someone who likes to keep improving yourself and your life, so giving this some thought will probably open up ideas about progress that would excite you and strengthen your ability to handle future challenge while maintaining better balance and more of a sense of ease.

Particularly if you’re someone who is sensitive to and aware of the people and events around you, I don’t think life as a human ever becomes easy.  One of the things that can be counted on is that your life never turns out exactly the way you expected.  And yet, this is part of what makes life thrilling—the element of surprise, the constant interweaving of an array of complex factors that promotes endless possibility.  That will not change no matter how much we wish it to, so what can you do to appreciate the overall tapestry and the colors you’re weaving into the whole?  What can you do to turn up your ability to savor your everyday experience of the process and the beauty it offers?