Spinning the Plates

You know that guy in the circus who spins plates atop the skinny, pointed rods?  He sets out spinning just one, finds its balance point and spins it like crazy.  Then another and another.  But at several points he has to break this routine to return to the previously balanced plates; they are beginning to lose balance.  The process continues until several plates are spinning in unison.  It's really sort of crazy.

That's how I feel life is at times...when I let it.  I have competing forces at work in my mind.  One force has me sorting through the mounds and mounds of ideas I intend to see through, searching for the starting and balance points, while the other force is my life's time clock.  I am perishable and there are only so many of these ideas that I can see through to completion.  It is a constant battle, not of good versus evil, but of life versus death.  I want to treat life like a verb and experience everything I possibly can before my time expires.  It takes balance. 

"Balance is the homeostasis of the human spirit. On one side is the joy of actually living life, and the other is the fear you can't do enough in this short time." ~ Jason Huntsinger

So I run back and forth, spinning the plates trying to maintain their balance.  Here's the kicker in it all...I feel like that's all I'm really doing at times: standing in one place spinning plates.  I've written and posted about the value of action and it seems to be a recurring thought for me.  As each day passes I'm beginning to realize I need to reduce the number of plates I'm spinning so that I can spend less time running back and forth.

That really is the tough part because I find value in every idea that occupies my mind: writing my book, starting my magazine, exercising my body, building a loving relationship, turning my life to personal training, pursuing stable employment for benefits and retirement...they are all important in their own sense and work together to create this vision of my life from here forward.  If I focus on just one or two ideas, in an effort to minimize the clutter, I feel the ideas abandoned truly don't deserve that fate.  Nor do I.  

Balance can be the toughest, on-going life task to master.  Will any of us really master it?  Is our pursuit of this mastery just a pointless, upsetting practice we're placing on ourselves?  What if I don't get to do everything I ever wanted to do in this life?  Here is the fix: focus on what you can do in this life and put everything into it.  While it may not be quite as dramatic as a circus act analogy, it will be more productive in creating your own fulfilling lifestyle.  You see, by reducing our effort in any given task--by being too preoccupied in moving on to the next--we fail to really experience it.  Our focus is drawn away.  The "up" side of our spiritual homeostasis is cut short because we've closed off our receptors to living life in this moment. What we're left with is the counterbalancing "down" side wrought with worry that the day is passing, we're another year older and we've lost yet another opportunity to do it all.

Perhaps today I will let a couple of these plates slow to a stop then stack them nicely in the corner for the future.  Then I will go back and spin the holy hell out of the remaining plates!