Life feels suffocatingly busy right now. How about for you?
Part of the intensity is simply the season of the year combined with my season of life. What's with the month of May anyway? With school-aged kids, it seems that spring activities culminate, grad parties and special events abound, and summer activities already start. So it's non-stop fun, right?
Pile on the fact that there's no such thing as a down minute unless you walk away from civilization and hibernate in the Boundary Waters. Like many families, we have an array of electronic equipment that is ringing, beeping, chirping, scrolling or singing at any given moment. I was thinking back to when I was in high school - no PCs, no cells, no iAnything, no Googling...not even cordless home phones. I make it sound like the Dark Ages. It kind of was from an electronics standpoint. My parents gave me a Smith Corona typewriter for my high school graduation. Unlike my mom's typewriter in our home office, this new one was light enough to carry. (Well, I'm not sure that I could actually carry it, but my dad could.) My dad was quite progressive in having this fancy brick-like device in his car that he used to communicate to others who were working in various potato and wheat fields. "Just like uptown," my mom would say. I was never sure what planet that uptown was on, but it wasn't near my orbit.
When Leah was in pre-school, probably around 1997, I bought my first "car phone"...you know, a phone to have in your car for emergencies. I vividly remember when I had this ah-ha moment in her pre-school parking lot. Hey, I could unplug this thing and put it in my purse when I run into pre-school. Ooooh, cool. I was concerned that my little slip of a phone would get lost in the bottom of my huge mom purse so I made a mental note to keep track of it and not spill iced tea on it.
Fast forward to today. On top of the fact that there's no escaping, the world is simply intense. Some of the intensity is energizing with God actively at work around the world, the rapid pace of innovation, and the connectivity of social networking. Then there's the staggering number of world events just this year - from devastating natural disasters to the death of Bin Laden to celebrities' dark secrets coming into the light. Closer to home, there's pressure in all of our organizations to get results with fewer resources, and health issues that some of our friends are facing. In his book, Margin, Dr. Richard Swenson wrote, "For millenia upon millenia, change was slow, controlled, assessable; now it convulses at warp speed. ... No one in the history of humankind has ever had to live with the number and intensity of stressors we have acting upon us today."
So how do we cope and even thrive? And how do we help coach our children to be prepared for a world that may be even more intense? I read a lot about life balance (does that count?), but it continues to elude me. It sounds very reasonable to work 8 am - 5 pm, put away all electronics at 8 pm, only allow each child to be involved in one activity, have a nice family dinner each night, and feel caught up before I go to bed. Then real life kicks in. I think it's healthy to recognize that life moves crazy fast, and I need to carefully choose my priorities and seek to live a healthy balance that's realistic in today's reality.
What works for you as you seek some semblance of a balanced life? Let me know what works for you and I'll share our collective tips next week.
No comments:
Post a Comment