As someone who operates life with a jam-packed calendar to enable the commitments of a family of five, a small business owner, a career and volunteer activities, it is incredible how it can all disappear instantly by choice.
Dictated by unplanned life moments that cannot be prepared for, there are times when dropping everything is the only thing you can do.
Aspiring to live life with an intentional imbalance, I don’t strive for work-life balance or an even spread of time between the things I sign up for.
It is a deliberate and intentional imbalance.
Sometimes in life, the imbalance falls too far in one direction, but there is nothing wrong with that if it is intentional.
In the last couple of weeks, while I have been grappling with the fact that my daughter, Mads, is 7,000 kilometres away, contending with rain, a heatwave and a typhoon (World Scout Jamboree), my husband Nathan decided to scare me with his health.
Luckily it was nothing more than a dodgy gall bladder which Dr Nicole promptly removed at the Hillcrest hospital.
However, it is in those moments of uncertainty when you question what is happening and what will happen.
In addition, the dreaded ‘Have I done enough’ rears its ugly head too.
In other words, did I get the intentional imbalance right?
While I recognise that it wasn’t me with the health scare, it may as well have been.
More than 60 per cent of my time on this earth has been with Nathan by my side, and it feels like he is an extension of me and I of him.
If I can put my hand on my heart and know that my choices are ones I would be happy with in my final days, then yes, I got it right.
But if there is doubt, moments in life shake us up that we must embrace and reflect on.
While it is a worst-case scenario mindset, in the night and day before we discovered the bad attitude of the pesky gall bladder, everything ran through my mind.
What could it be? What if it is something serious? What will we do? How will we handle this?
While I know that age is on our side and we have not been subjected to severe ill health in our relationship, many around me have been.
I recognise too that it is only when it is real for you, or potentially real for a short period, that a glimmer of the experience can be understood.
With a jam-packed calendar and a known diagnosis, treatment and recovery plan, it is safe to say that my intentional imbalance shifted significantly in favour of my family, and rightly so.
While they share me with my career, my small business obligations and my community, they know that I will drop everything for them, and that is precisely what I did.
Imagine an intentional imbalance is like having juggling balls in the air.
Some are glass, and some are plastic.
When you need to shift the focus to the extreme, you drop the plastic balls and pass the glass ones to someone trusted.
For example, the plastic balls I dropped were Scouts, friends, work and work travel.
The glass balls I had to hand over to someone trusted, were my children.
All to look after my glass ball of a husband who stayed in my hands.
A full calendar became empty quickly because a big life moment came along to ground us.
You don’t hear people saying in their final days that they wished they’d worked more; they’ll tell you instead that they wished they’d loved more and spent time with their family – the glass balls.
A timely reminder too to read my own words written and printed in the second book I co-authored, “Your definition of success will be different to everyone else, and that’s all right. What works for you doesn’t for others, and what works for others won’t for you.
Be true to yourself and focus on consistently showing up in the world. Each day strive to be better than yesterday.
Set your intention and achieve.
Don’t strive for balance because achieving it is b******t.
Identify which are your glass juggling balls and which ones are made to bounce.
Know your values and work on an Intentional Imbalance.”
