Day 3152: Balancing needs

Yesterday, as I was balancing my needs with other people’s needs while working at home, I asked this question on Twitter:

The answers were balanced, and many people cited the Oxygen Mask Metaphor: you can’t effectively take care of other people’s needs if you ignore your own.

I continue to learn more about this balancing act for myself, as I witness other people struggling to balance their needs with others’.

What balancing needs do you see in my other images for today?

It’s might be challenging balancing the needs of fajita day with ice cream pie day, etc.

Here and now, I need to share a favorite tune from this CD I picked up on one of my balanced and needed walks yesterday:

How do you balance your needs with other people’s needs? You don’t need to reply, but I look forward to all the comments that will be balancing below.

As always, I need to express my gratitude to all who give me what I need to stay balanced blogging every day, including YOU.

Day 2946: What gets your attention?

Now that I’ve gotten your attention with the title of today’s post, I’ll admit that toxic people and dangerous situations are getting my attention, here and now.

I find it difficult to pay attention to the positive when so many negatives — like injustice, climate change, the pandemic, and untrustworthy people with power — need attention.

Negatives naturally get our attention, including negatives about ourselves. We pay attention to the negative in order to attend to and solve problems.

However, ignoring the positives within and around us can distort our attention — keeping us overwhelmed, anxious, depressed, and stressed. We need to balance our attention in order to more effectively attend to ourselves and others.

What gets your attention in my latest photos?

Good food and cats have been getting my attention for decades.

This is what got my attention during the America Celebrates Inauguration Day special:

If you leave a comment about what gets your attention, attention will be paid.

Finally, what gets my attention is gratitude, so thanks to all who help me attend to this daily blog, including YOU.

Day 2320: Living the Dream

For me, living the dream includes spending quality time with wonderful people. Yesterday, I heard from my dream of a friend, Jeanette, who is living in Philadelphia, that she will be spending more time in Boston because of a job change.  For me, this is a dream come true.   In response, I sent her this image:

I believe I am living the dream, here and now, because

• I have a job I love,
• I have friends I love,
• I have a boyfriend I love and live with,
• I’m President of a group therapy organization I love,
• I get to blog every day for lovely and lively people,
• I’m taking a vacation next week during the dreamiest time of the year in Boston, and
• my son is coming home from University this month!

Living the dream includes balance, which was the topic of yesterday’s Coping and Healing group.  Can you see  other aspects of living the dream in these photos?

 

Drake White is Living the Dream:

Sturgill Simpson is Living the Dream:

What does living the dream mean to you?

Living the dream includes experiencing and expressing gratitude, so thanks to all who helped me create today’s blog post and — of course! — to YOU.

 

Day 1088: Oh what fun

Oh what fun it is to create this blog post for you and for me, on Christmas eve day.

Oh what fun it was for me to see this last night, accompanied by my son Aaron and my boyfriend Michael:

Oh what fun it is for me to share this familiar song with the lyrics “Oh what fun.”

Oh what fun it would be to do this …

… and this:

Oh what fun I had taking all these other photos yesterday:

 

Oh what fun it is, for me, to:

• live near such interesting places,
• have another day on this earth,
• spend time with those I love, and
• do work that is fulfilling, a great fit for my talents and interests, and more fun than others might imagine.

Oh what fun it would be if you commented, below.

Oh what fun I hope you had, here and now.

 

 

Day 198: The Balance of The Internal and External

This is what I’m thinking this morning:

It’s helpful to balance the internal world and the external world.

Too much focus on the internal world of my own thoughts, feelings and experience = Out of Balance.

Too much focus on the external world (including the internal worlds of other people) = Out of Balance.

The trick, ladies and gentleman, is to figure out a “good enough” balance.

Another trick is to leave lots of room for good-enough balances (so there’s not a razor-thin edge of sought perfection). (That’s a useful trick, in lots of human endeavors.)

I just looked for a visual aid for this post, by googling “balance.” The one I chose, first, was this:

Hmmmm. Maybe these guys said “Balancing can be simple” because they were trying to sell somebody something.

But maybe they’re right, anyway.

Simple doesn’t mean obvious or easy, though, does it?

Another image that grabbed me, in that Google search, was this:

That image lead me to this page, called “A Very, Very, Very Delicate Balance.” There, RadioLab’s Robert Krulwich writes about the artist, Michael Grab:

These rocks, says the artist, are not glued, not Velcroed. This is not a trick.

Here are some other things I could write about this morning:

• NPR’s RadioLab, in particular, is something I’ve been wanting to take some time to listen to, as I re-balance my personal internal and external.
• While I was writing this blog post, my cat, who is a much more adept and complex user of my laptop than I am, suddenly made all the components I was using to compose this post disappear — Pooof!
• Which resulted in my needing to use a different part of WordPress to finish this post, which made that last picture show up smaller than I wanted (I haven’t figured out, yet, how to fix this).

Perhaps, if I had more time this morning, I could more smoothly and beautifully arrange the pieces of this post, to pull everything together, making a bridge to some amazing conclusion.

But I don’t. So, that concludes our blog post for today.

Thank you, dear reader, for including this as part of your balance, today.

_____

P.S. On January 9, 2014, I re-visited this post, with more knowledge than I had when I first wrote it, on July 17, 2013. So, now, I will present that image in the size I wanted to, back then:

 

Yay!