“Don’t be all about business.  Overwork, a lack of balance, it ends in ruin.  It’s a false dichotomy to think you can just squeeze more and more out of yourself.  You are no good to yourself and to the people around you if you put your professional obligations and advancements above everything else.  Step back.  Don’t overcommit.  Learn your limits,” Marcus Aurelius and author unknown.  Learning limits goes hand in hand with understanding what we can control and avoidance.  The world has so much to offer and we all want to get as much as we can our of our time here but that isn’t possible.  We can’t do it all—we can do all that we were meant to do and there is a big difference.  Constantly saying yes for the sake of saying yes, prioritizing the to-do list over time spent with the creative outlets life has to offer, not responding to the call of what we are supposed to do leaves us with a hole that will never be complete by adding more work to our day.  That’s just how it is.  It can be frustrating and possibly even create a sense of missing out, however, it can also give a real sense of purpose.  The fact that we can’t do everything shows us what we CAN do and there is real joy in what we can do.  Purposeful work brings us a sense of belonging and value and that’s wonderful—but so does purposeful time spent doing other things like spending time in nature, sitting with our family and having a good laugh, drawing, singing, speaking, learning. 

We are given this time and we truly do have the gift of being able to do whatever we want with it.  I spent a lot of time in overwhelm just considering the possibilities life has to offer.  It felt so final to make a choice to do one thing and I avoided commitment all the time.  I realized that feeling came about because I was trying to do it all.  Things I didn’t care about, not really.  It was an effort to prove I held my weight and that I was worthy.  It was an effort to mark things off an endless to-do list that included things that weren’t even mine.  I mean this in the least selfish way possible: why would we do that?  Why would we fill our time with other people’s obligations?  I don’t understand what it is in people where we fall into these categories where we do it all on our own, we take on everyone else’s stuff, or we seem to be lazy.  With all the distraction today, we find ourselves torn between overwork and laziness—neither of which are productive.  Balance really is the key.  Balance looks different for all of us, that’s true so we will have varying degrees of busy and time spent recovering.  That is up to us to decide and when we find it, we hold onto it.