BaLANciNg AcT

I admit it.

I can’t call my mother. I’ve talked less and less often with her. And I’ve struggled with all kinds of guilt and all kinds of other emotions.

It’s painful.

It’s painful to be so far away from her. Painful to know she is trapped inside most of the time. Painful to know she might feel trapped inside her confusion and inside a brain that is drying out from the outside in. Painful to experience (for the third time) the knowing that the women in my family share the Alzheimer’s thread. Painful to feel the ominous understanding that someday my mother will be another huge loss. And selfishly, it’s too hard to deal with most days.

Painful to feel so helpless.

As is often the case, my work on another – my compassion for another - taught me something profound today. While in session, I had this sentence go through my mind, “For every healthy SAD, you need to counter balance with healthy JOY.”  And the bigger the sadness, the greater the need for heavy duty injections of joy. Sounds simple, right? But how many of us get swallowed by the things that are difficult? The things that make us mourn, sorrowful, sad? It dawned on me today, it’s so easy to know sadness. But it’s so crucial and so vitally important to find that same intensity of JOY. Intentionally find things, large and small, that even out the pressure your mind, body and heart feel when dealing with loss. And I haven’t proven it, but I’m pretty sure the AMOUNTS of joy, the number of occurrences that make you smile, laugh and feel warm fuzzies needs to be GREATER than the sad in order to bring about a homeostasis in the soul. All of a sudden riding on that thought, I realized we all need to give ourselves permission to find those reasons to giggle. Discover what things, from hobbies to warms baths to sky diving or whatever it may be, add to your well-being in order to stay healthy and balanced and “whole”.

Don’t just find joy. Seek it out. Live it. Become it and let it keep you upright and let it elevate you on purpose.