The time is 12:47 p.m. on Sunday, September 24th. I’m writing last night’s blog post now. I missed my commitment to a daily post yesterday. Wah wah.

I knew all week that Saturday was going to be a tough day to write and publish my daily post because I had clients scheduled in the morning, Mike was coming to finish rebuilding my house foundation where the chimney once stood late morning, and my friend Ann would arrive into town early afternoon to hang and stay the night.

There will be no time for writing on Saturday, I predicted. And I was right.

My days are pretty intense these days. They start at 5 a.m., and I don’t stop until around 9 p.m. when I can finally write these daily posts. Most nights, it’s a two-ish hour process.

Despite my best efforts to write Saturday’s post ahead of time, I didn’t manage to pull it off.  I was open to an opportunity to write at some point while Ann and I visited, but a lull never occurred. And I wasn’t willing to break my presence with her to get it done. 

We’re all mixtures of strengths and weaknesses and have tendencies that shape our personalities, choices, and expression.

I have historically been someone who prioritizes work over downtime and pursuit over leisure.

While away at college in Orlando, I vividly recall conversing with my father, who painstakingly worked two jobs to pay for my sister and me to complete college so we wouldn’t have loans. He said, “Jenn, you’ve got to work hard, yes. But you’ve got to play just as hard.”

One of the challenges to finding balance is that I find work to be so much fun. As a kid, I would make my friends play library, grocery store, and school, and I even made a podcast which, back then, was recording myself onto a cassette tape. For Christmas, I would ask for office supplies and briefcases. I’ve never found work to be work.

But, I see the benefit of challenging myself to break from my norm. Even more beneficial is breaking from the norm for a reason that defies the principles the model is built upon.

Can you make peace with both of those parts of you? Can you find a way to be so present and free of judgment within that you allow elements of yourself to coexist that fundamentally oppose each other? That’s the ultimate accomplishment.

It’s easy to be militant. To have strict rules. To never stray from the course. This is why dogma and doctrine is so seductive. The hard stuff is done for you. You just step into a program that someone or something else built and assume the identity. That requires no relation to self except that of a dictator to ensure you stay in line.

It’s challenging to be more fluid. To be fluid means we have to be accountable to ourselves, not rules. We have to know ourselves, not dogma. And we have to govern ourselves moment by moment rather than the pre-determined dictates of a particular ideology.

Pulling off the integration of opposing forces within is something worth celebrating. Cheers to being ooey gooey. Cheers to trusting that knowing within. Cheers to moderating times in the extremes. Cheers to intuition. Cheers to you.