Some days you're on. Some days, you feel off. Sometimes you feel like you are racing ahead in life, and other times you feel that you are coasting along, barely pedaling.
But most days I feel more like a light switch: on and off.
And other days you just want to turn off.
How many gears does any one person have?
We had an interesting guest speakers in class this week and last in career management. They spoke about what constitutued a work-life balance, and they admitted that my generation has a different idea about work-life balance than previous generations. Apparently, we work to live, we don't live to work.
Sometimes I feel that way. But, work gives me purpose, and gives me meaning. When I'm working, I'm being productive. I like living on the high tension note of break-neck speed. It's my kind of life. I like doing something that is valuable, it's not all about fun in the sun. Because for me, fun means being busy. I like being busy.
And generally, I prefer my life to be more about the things I do, than the time I spend relaxing. I'm not really one for sitting around catching up on DVDs or seasons of random shows I've missed. (In fact, relaxing isn't something I do very well. Heh. Nobody's perfect.)
I have been trying so hard to slow down things in my life, I have now officially slowed them to the point where it's too slow. The bike is hardly moving. I need to switch gears again.
The point of life is to live. And yes, we can live at our own speeds, but we have to do something with our lives for our lives to be meaningful. No one has told us how to live. In fact, more than ever, we live in a kind of world that tells us it won't and it can't tell us how to live.
And while you might think this is bad, it isn't. Because we get to decide how to live our lives. That means we have to be fearless, and not be afraid of the things we don't know and can't predict. And, when we blow a flat tire, we patch it up again. When we take the wrong road, we turn around and we head back. We take the other path we thought about taking in the first place.
Life is about balance. But we can't worry about what side of life we're leaning towards--relaxation or working too hard--because you can't count the cost of being who you really are. Pushing ahead and climbing that hill while your legs are screaming, that's fun sometimes, but we can't always live that way. In the same way, we can't just meander in the countryside for our whole lives. We get bored with ourselves, and with the scenery. A life, a good life, demands that we switch gears, and constantly try to better ourselves, and to enjoy ourselves at the same time.
How many shifts do you need to make to climb your next challenge?
No comments:
Post a Comment