Balance: Mind and Body

I was running down the stairs this week in response to Emmett crying in his playpen. I was in the middle of putting my socks on, and I had one sock (a heavy slipper sock) on, and one off. You would not believe how discombobulating and dizzying a feeling it is to run down the stairs with one socked foot and one bare foot. I could hardly keep my balance. My brain was completely confused.

As soon as Emmett was cared for, I put my other sock on. Why? Because apparently it's a liability for a klutzy person like me to be running around the house with only one sock on. Also, because people wear two socks...obviously.

That dizzying feeling I had reminded me of having a migraine. Any migraine sufferers out there? You probably know exactly what I mean. The odd time I get a migraine, I get that terrible visual "aura" that involves half of my vision being blurred away. When I look at my face in the mirror, I only see half of my face. When I look at my hand, I only see part of it, and it doesn't even feel like it's attached to my body. With that weird feeling going on, I can hardly walk straight. So what do you do when you have a migraine? You take something, shut out the world and lay down until your balance comes back.

When I was thinking about these things, this is what I wondered:

OK. Obviously when our bodies feel "out of balance," like in the circumstances I described above, we immediately rectify the situation. We don't function well when our bodies are out of balance, so we fix it. I feel like it's almost redundant to say this because it's so obvious.

What about our minds? What about our lives?

We all know that the key to life is balance. As soon as your life tilts out of balance, everything seems to go awry. If you work too much, your home and family suffer. If you don't spend enough time with God, His peace seems further away and less able to calm the storms of a busy life.

To let your mind (especially if you're a worrier) or your life (especially if you have many responsibilities) get out of balance is easy. To realize that you haven't experienced real balance of your mind in several months is not uncommon. Sometimes we are so busy that we don't even have time to recognize the imbalance of our lives!

I wondered at how simply and quickly I put my physical body back into balance...but why have I neglected my mind...why have I neglected my LIFE?

I let my sock experience be a reminder to me that on busy days, when I'm running around trying to accomplish too many things, my mind is just sitting there, having its own migraine. (Ironically, those are the days when I'm prone to getting an actual, physical migraine.) My mind is just waiting for me to "take a chill pill," shut out the world and just "be"...because we are much more capable of handling life's challenges and enjoying life's blessings when we can "walk" straight!

If your life is full of the one-sock-on, one-sock-off kind of days, I implore you to put the other figurative, fluffy sock back on! Walking the tightrope of life is impossible without balance--physical and mental balance.