Profusion

Shirt over my head, shorts cinched at my waist, shoe laces double-knotted, I’m out the door at dawn inhaling the intoxicating scent of blooming lilacs on a warm, damp morning.  It’s been months since I’ve pounded the pavement with any sort of regularity; I need to ease in.  I’m only going two miles, I tell myself, enough to get my soul-feeding fix, but not so much to risk irritating a capricious knee.

There was a time in my life when a two-mile run would have been unacceptable.  I would need to tell myself that this gig is only temporary, determined to work back up to 4-5 mile stints as part of a measured plan.  It’s different this time, though.  My world is expanding again, and as I’m running this morning I’m thinking about balance and making room for all I want to invest in with this one wild and precious life.

Those of us in first-world countries, we live in a bubble of abundance:  Plenty of food on our tables, money in the bank.  So much so that we’ve become a little too comfortable with waste.  If we don’t get around to consuming the produce in the crisper, we’re generally not too bothered to toss it in the garbage.  When it comes to money, there is talk about phasing out the penny. Seems we’re all too rich to be bothered by the hassle of copper.  And so I consider time in a similar context questioning whether we’re cavalier about this commodity as well.  Does it make sense to apply some judiciousness in this realm, even when the time we’re spending liberally is going toward what we enjoy? 

  

When we think of tasks that drain our time, we seem to always look to chores we must do.  Of course it makes sense to want to cut down the time we spend on the mundane. But what I’m noticing is we can pour ourselves into activities we enjoy, consuming an enormous amount of time which we simply overlook when we’re attempting to assess opportunities for balance.  Can there ever be such thing as too much of a good thing?

I will argue yes.  Those of us who have found ourselves in the throes of challenging life-altering situations may be familiar with the protective mechanism called overindulgence.  We choose one activity where we feel most successful, valued and affirmed, and because we garner all of our worth here, we expend disproportionate energy in an attempt to leach every bit of mojo we can from this one source. We can couch our justification for this obsession around excuses like we’re spending all this time at work to earn a big bonus or secure a promotion.  Or, of course running 24/7 to train for a marathon is warranted because being fit is healthy.  But I wonder what happens when we really look hard at the gaps we’re attempting to fill with this single-minded focus? 

When I was all about logging miles I was also all about dealing with pain, filling the void of loneliness.  It’s entirely possible there are times we need to retreat into our obsessions in order to survive.  Our behaviors become rote, though, and we can wake up one morning wondering what happened to all of our precious time.  But maybe this is how we know we are healing, when we finally question our unilateral investment and yearn for more diversity.

And so as I bound happily toward the ever-growing opportunities in my life, I’m looking at where I may be overindulging and asking myself what exactly I need to be fulfilled.  I don’t need 5 mile runs or 90 minutes of yoga 5 days a week or business on the weekends.  I’m finding I can meet my needs and get time back. To me it’s all about the freedom to invest in the new and wonderful people and projects finding their way onto my path, any time, all the time.