Balance

Balance, you need it to walk in a straight line, and you need it to lead a healthy life. Between mental heath, physical heath, and spiritual health there has to be a balance. 

It’s been a slow walk to take good care of my body. It doesn’t come easy to me, it requires me think, be completely on top of myself. It’s the first thing to go when I get lazy or get lonely. But physical health at least is pretty straight forward, there’s no vipers waiting in the grass, no real pitfalls to watch for. 

Mental and spiritual health however are beasts of a different nature. If you can get a handle on the spiritual side it’s not as hard to hold onto, but mental health? Mental health, which is a lot like emotional health, that is where the true battle lies for me. It may come easier to me, but knowing all the right answers gets me in just as much trouble as forgetting them. 

People say your 20s are about finding yourself, so far I’ve spent every waking moment just trying to learn how to take care of myself. At nearly three years in I can say the big thing I’ve learned is that balance is key. When a piece falters you give it its due attention. Don’t abandon the others completely but shift the energy spent to correct the imbalance. It’s juggling the ups and downs of the different kinds of health. 

It’s a delicate and finicky dance, but one that must be done. 

I have a self imposed deadline to meet, and I’m going at it as hard as I can, but I have to make time for people. For friends and family. Being an artist is, in my currant case, a one man sport and team, so it’s easy to become isolated. Some would say required. It takes conscious effort to not get stuck in a cycle of isolation. I let, forced, myself to go out with a friend this week. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see her, I did, I needed to find the balance between my deadline and needing to see people because it’s good for me and just plain good. 

Take this funny example, I’ll ask my mom ‘you ever look at your hand too long and it stops looking like a hand? Like it starts looking alien?’ She often replies with a what are you on about, but the sentiment isn’t lost, when you look at anything for too long, or say a word too many times in a row, it starts not sounding or looking the same. Something about prolonged attention changes the accepted understating of things. 

Think too long and you overthink, sit too long and you become apathetic, hold your breath too long, and… well you know. It’s about balance, you need to think things through, but not to the point of anxiety. You have to sit down to rest, but you still need to get back up again. Same can be said for physical health and mental health, you need to put in time to exercise but not so long that it comes at the expense of getting your work done. You need to take care of your emotional heart but not at the expense of trying new things and taking risks. 

Like I said finicky delicate dance. 

I don’t have the whole thing worked out to a science, and I’m sure smarter people than I have written whole books about it, but I come at it for the perspective of art. We artist types tend to give our all or nothing and it often is not sustainable. We have to learn balance, some nights burning the midnight oil is great, but not every night. 

A delicate dance is still one that must be danced.