Bringing your life back to balance

(c) Cashewnuts

Your life is made of different sections. Some of them are focused around you (your health, your mind, your career, your spirituality). Other sections include other people like your family, friends, work colleagues. Some deal with your contributions to your society. Now imagine each section is represented by a rock of different size. Trying to get the rocks to balance is an art that not many people master.

It’s easy for one rock to fall out of place, and send your life plummeting into ruins. For example, you lose your job. It affects your attitude, and consequently your relationship with people. Maybe you become so upset that you give in to emotional overeating and eat your way slowly to obesity. And before you know it, In other words, all the rocks find themselves on the floor.

So to balance the rocks, changes would need to be made. You would need to exert extra effort to keep your life in place. Don’t let the other rocks give in to gravity as they would have a tendency to do. So, think of it like this, now that you are out of a job, you have ten hours which you can invest in exploring the other sections of your life. The whole thing is to realize that you need to exert the extra effort not to have failure in one area lead to failure in others.
I was watching Steve Jobs commencement speech for the umpteenth time. He spoke about how ten years after co-founding Apple he was fired from the company he co-founded. He said, “What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn’t know what to do for a few months…But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife.”In case you didn’t read the whole quote, focus on that one line, “I still loved what I did.”
Company or no company, title or no title, he still loved what he did and so he did what he loved. So it’s easy to feel disoriented when you wake up to a life you no longer recognize. But it’s time to go back to the drawing board and ask yourself that question, what do you love doing?