Authentic August – Day 6
Another late night entry. It’s 9:55 pm. I was originally going to continue yesterday’s post, but I’ll postpone that for later this week when I can give that the proper attention it deserves.
For tonight I’ll just type and see where my fingers take me! Stream of consciousness style. More of a journal entry, I guess. Just sharing what’s on my mind and heart, which is exactly what Rule #3 dictates:
Be authentic.
It’s absurd to believe that life should always be rainbows and butterflies. It’s equally absurd to only focus on one’s suffering. To be human is to be simultaneously broken and beautiful. To experience the depths of sorrow in one moment, and the expansion of love in the next. It’s the yin and the yang. The chaos and the order. A balance.
Now even though I know it’s all a balancing act, that’s just head knowledge. Theory. Experiencing balance firsthand is a process. You need to study yourself and discover what keeps you balanced. But the only way to figure that out is if you fail. It’s rather paradoxical, right? That the only way to fine-tune balance is in the moments when we’re off balance.
I guess one of the questions I’m constantly seeking to answer is
“How do I find balance?”
Even in the last post, the point I was eventually going to get to is that you need to balance out the good emotions with the bad emotions. You need to welcome them both into your home with a cup of tea and a smile.
That’s why my tagline to this website is “discipline. surrender. play.” This was inspired by an image I saw online, a venn diagram with one circle as discipline, the other surrender, and in the space where they overlap you get flow. I use the word play because it resonates more with me. That in-between place is where the magic is. It’s creation. It’s co-creating with the universe.
“How do I find balance?”
By trial and error. By failing forward. By studying yourself as if you were not yourself. By asking questions. By seeking out the wisdom of others. By… constantly learning. Become the eternal student. Find balance through learning. Sounds like common sense, but common sense isn’t always common practice.
Like I said, stream of consciousness! Really what I wanted to say is that I’m starting to feel better. I had a couple of rough weeks. Nothing terribly wrong, just not on my A-game. And what I’m beginning to realize is that that is completely normal. It’s to be expected even. You can’t always be on top of the world. Some days you’re just gonna be down in the dumps, and maybe even for a string of days or weeks or longer. But if we know that after some good days, bad days will come, we can be a little more gentle with ourselves when they get here. We can be lazy without judgement, we can take care of ourselves, and we can move through them feels instead of resisting them.
I’ll try to keep this in mind next time.
With LOVE,
Q. (11:11 pm)