Most people who know me would agree that I am a pretty efficient person. I get things done and generally feel like I’m on top of my life. But these last two years, that’s definitely switched to feeling that my life has been on top of me.
Maybe you know this season. It comes by different doors for each of us: a house torn open to its studs, a body that changes its terms without asking, a parent who needs us, a grief, a job that doubles overnight. Some seasons bring two of them in the same week, and the days fill like a jar that was already full. For me it was the house and the body together. A new home to renovate in 2024, then the lower-level retreat space I now call the Soul Medicine Sanctuary. If any of you have been through a two-year renovation while living in the home you’ve renovated, then you know: endless hours searching for products, dust on everything and strangers with tools moving through my home, and my god, the noise. All the decisions and all the conversations holding contractors accountable for subpar work. So much, and then there was the amplification of one of the chronic conditions I live with that made it hard to stand for more than a few minutes. Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and POTS. And of course all the tending a life asks for anyway, the doctors’ appointments, the billing, the accounting, the friends I love, and an inbox that kept filling whether or not I had the time for it. I’m sure all of you have had times like these, when the responsibilities of everyday life pile up higher than you can fully manage.
Somewhere in there I learned something about juggling. A juggler who can keep six balls in the air can only keep six balls in the air. Throw her a seventh and if she reaches for it, ultimately all balls fall to the ground, which is another way of saying she burns out.
So, we choose, or the choosing is done for us. I juggled what I could, six on the hardest days, ten on a good day, but that 11th, I had to let it fall, and honestly, not even give it my attention because the other 10 had need of me. The inquiries I would have loved to answer, the accounting that had to wait for another day, retreats I would have loved to have attended, new clients I could not take on, and potential connections that had to be set aside, hopefully for another day. If you were in the container of one of those balls, I likely left you bouncing alone. I am sorry for that…AND…it’s what it had to be.
Now, the me who loves efficiency was not happy about this. She has caught my life’s falling objects for decades, and she stood in the middle of the room shouting PICK IT UP. PICK IT UP. SOMEBODY IS WAITING. Maybe you have a part like her too. I let her shout, empathized with her, kept my own voice soft as I offered her loving and wise counsel. And kept my hands right where they were, on the balls I could juggle.
I have met this edge before. My first job out of graduate school was at a public mental health agency, the most tangled organization I have ever worked inside, and I say that as a former human resources director and consultant whose specialty was walking into companies that had outgrown their own systems and sorting the chaos, so I know chaos by its first name. This organization wanted thirty-five clients a week from every new therapist, plus the notes and the meetings and the steering committees and the consultations. Nobody has that many hours. It was the first time my efficiency met a wall, and I did what I do when I am struggling: I created a sanity mantra. “I was hired to do the job of one person. I can only be one person. Not 1.1, not 1.5, and certainly not two.”
The mantra of these past years was its cousin. “If you do not decide which balls to drop, you will drop them all. Choose which ones to drop.”
The walls are now up and freshly painted. The beds are in and pillows fluffed. The Soul Medicine Sanctuary is beautiful and finished, I am holding gatherings here, and in 2027 the doors open for retreats. There are floors to be re-laid and contractor trouble still left to sort out, but when the hammers stopped, I turned toward the drawers. Twenty-five years of practice leaves a great many of them. So, I’ve been in the practice of gutting the old wardrobe to make space for the clothes that fit. Building a start from scratch website that speaks to what I actually do, updating forms and policies, cleaning out over a thousand emails half of which had never been attended to. So, I’ve been in the long process of opening these drawers, getting rid of all that doesn’t serve so there is space for that which does.
Maybe you have a drawer like that, or a room, or a calendar, or a promise made in a year that no longer exists. It may be that a bit of spring cleaning is needed.
I keep coming back to the idea of a right-sized life. Does your life fit into your own two hands? For me that is about having a right-sized email list. A right-sized number of groups to run beside a practice, in addition to consulting with therapists and coaching executives and holding three to five day personal retreats. And also, having time for friends, play and the minutia of everyday life.
I wonder how many of us are being asked for more than one person can hold.
The floor around my feet is clear enough to see now. I have set five of the balls down and am slowly adding the fifth, then the sixth.
It was a hard lesson, this setting down balls, and I’m grateful this round is over. I have not, though, returned to the sense of being on top of my life. As I am juggling the balls that I can easily hold now, I am witnessing something more easeful arise, being in right-relationship with my life.
May you know which balls are yours to carry.
May you let the others fall without shame,
and may the floor be soft where they land.
May your hands be the size of your life, and your life the size of your hands.