“To acquire balance means to achieve that happy medium between the minimum and the maximum that represents your optimum. The minimum is the least you can get by with. The maximum is the most you're capable of. The optimum is the amount or degree of anything that is most favorable toward the ends you desire.” Nido Qubein, PhD.
Over the past few days I have spent time considering the importance of achieving a balance between nourishing and depleting activities. At a surface level this concept looks simple - a straightforward equation of energy. Thinking in some more depth however, it strikes me as at the heart of recovery and the promotion of wellbeing more generally.
How is it that we fill our daily lives? What is it that happens between when we wake, and return to sleep at night? What we actually do with our time, from moment to moment, hour to hour, from one year to the next can very powerfully influence our physical and psychological health and wellbeing and our ability to deal with stress, difficult emotions and troublesome experiences.
When was the last time that you considered how it is that you spend your time?
It might be useful to take inventory, and review your schedule to ask yourself: of the things you do, what nourishes you? What lifts your mood, energises you, makes you feel calm and centred? What increases your sense of being alive and present, rather than merely existing?
Of the things you do, what depletes you? What pulls you down, drains your energy, or makes you feel tense and fragmented? What decreases your sense of being alive and present, what makes you feel you are merely existing, or worse?
...The serenity to accept the things we cannot change
The courage to change the things we can
The wisdom to know the difference...
Accepting that there are a great many things in life we have no power to change, there are many things that are within are control and personal responsibility in this respect is of vital significance. Response-ability: the ability to respond wisely to what we know to be true. Considering the questions above, what is it we can to do increase the time and effort devoted to nourishing activities and aspects of our lives, and decrease the time and energy given to things in our lives that deplete us?
If it is not possible to shift the balance on a practical level in this way, perhaps it is possible to alter our approach to these activities - what is it that we bring to our day to day experience that might add or detract thereto? Can we change our attitude through our approach and thereby have a rather different experience? Can we approach the seemingly familiar, or even mundane, with a fresh curiosity and act 'as if' rather than judging them or wishing they weren't there.
Very few of us leap out of of bed to greet our day with gratitude every morning. There are, inevitably, aspects of our experience we would wish away, but perhaps there is room for a subtle shift - in accepting what is, and bringing present moment awareness to them, as opposed to avoidance and aversion, perhaps we are better able to regulate our moods, and our responses to them.
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