Everyone thinks that being tall is a great thing. It does have its benefits, like being able to help people retrieve things from the top shelf at the grocery store, or feeling a little safer walking out at night, but there are also some disadvantages. Back pain, knee pain, and intimidating just about everyone until they know you’re a goofball.
Over the course of my summer vacation after middle school, heading into high school, I grew a lot. So much so that when I returned for my freshman year, I was almost six feet tall. This transition left me with the grace and style of a newborn baby giraffe. I had no understanding of my new center of gravity, and a simple act like walking down the street, let alone dribbling a basketball up and down the court, left me realizing that I had little feet and a big body.
Not very graceful.
It took some time to figure out how to move around in this new body. I had to learn where my feet were, where my weight was, and how to keep myself upright without looking like I was auditioning for a slapstick comedy.
I think life can be a little like that.
When you’re camping, you don’t have everything under control. The weather changes. You forget something. The mattress sucks. You don’t sleep well. Something doesn’t go according to plan. You can spend a lot of time trying to make everything work exactly the way you think it should, or you can accept that you’re sleeping on a crappy futon in the back of a minivan and make the best of it.
And yet you can sit around a fire with someone you enjoy being around and have one of the best weekends you’ve had in a long time.
Maybe that’s balance.
In this next phase of my life, I’m learning that even though I’m not completely ready for it, there needs to be more balance in my day-to-day life. I need to balance taking care of others with taking care of myself. I need to balance work with actually having a life. I need to balance being useful with simply experiencing something. I need to balance being a father with allowing my kids to figure some things out on their own.
I also need to balance the person I’ve been for more than 50 years with the person I’m becoming. That one is probably going to take some work.
I spent a lot of my life trying to keep all the plates spinning. I thought balance meant making sure nothing fell. Maybe I had it backwards. Maybe balance isn’t keeping everything in the air. Maybe it’s knowing which plates actually matter.
I’m beginning to realize that some things can wait. Some things don’t need to be fixed. Some things aren’t even mine to fix. And some things are worth dropping so I have both hands free to grab onto something else.
That’s probably the hardest part for me. I’ve spent so many years measuring whether I was doing enough for everyone else that doing something simply because I wanted to do it can still feel a little selfish.
I’m learning that it isn’t.
Maybe balance isn’t about finding some perfect point where everything gets exactly the same amount of attention. Maybe it’s recognizing what needs my attention right now, and being willing to let something else wait.
Sometimes that’s work.
Sometimes that’s family.
Sometimes that’s taking care of myself.
And sometimes it’s sitting around a campfire, getting very little sleep, laughing at something stupid, and realizing that I don’t actually need to be doing anything else.
I think I’m finally learning where my feet are again.
Now that I’m learning what balance looks like, what happens if I actually go somewhere I’ve never been?