Today, I heard some of the most powerful words I have in a long time.
You can’t have it all, at the same time.
We spend so much of our time and energy chasing it all. The best grades I can get, the best our marriage can ever be, the best I’ve ever looked, the most time I’ve ever spent with God, the best friendships I can ever imagine. And of course, there’s money, there’s clothes, there’s diamonds, there’s so much!
So much time goes by trying to balance it all. Yearning for what we cannot have, wishing for more hours in the day, missing the friends we cannot find the time to talk to, feeling guilty for not working on something that makes a difference… So much of life goes by because we not only spend the energy we have on things that need to be done, we also spend it worrying about other things we wish we could do. And at the end, we seem to be left with nothing.
Where does the time go? Do we not know how to prioritize? Are we selfish? Lazy? Stupid? Unable to run our own lives? The supermoms and the Oprah’s would definitely want us to believe that.
Over the last few months, I’ve started to believe that. I’ve started to worry that I’m not as “balanced” as I should be. That maybe, just maybe, I’m doing something wrong. There’s the flab around my tummy I haven’t been able to get rid of. There’s the dull skin and the unopened tubes of face pack. There’s the unused chapati dough in the fridge because I’ve been too lazy to make rotis. The clothes lay unironed and scattered int he closet. There are movies that lie unwatched. Books that lie unread. I haven’t sung, really sung, in years. I haven’t learned to play the keyboard yet despite owning one for a year… The list is endless…
But today, for the first time, I felt free.
For the first time in months, I’ve allowed myself to listen to the voice inside me that has been saying the same thing. The friends who have been telling me I don’t give myself enough credit. At last! I don’t get the feeling I should be doing something else. I’m just happy to be in the moment I’m in.
