Your life is a bunch of bowls in front of you. Each bowl is full of VERY IMPORTANT THINGS (eating healthy, getting exercise, paying all your bills on time, giving attention to grow your relationship with your partner, friendships, that book you want to write…etc). You are able to hold up and concentrate on only so many things (for our analogy we’ll say two.. but in reality its a bit more than two). You pick up two of these bowls and hold them up above your head being very careful so that none of the VERY IMPORTANT THINGS spill out. Occasionally you look down and notice the other (currently neglected) bowls of VERY IMPORTANT THINGS. You can choose to put down one bowl and pick up another.. or you can try to balance two bowls in a hand that can only really hold one bowl well but you know that this will cause you to spill some of the VERY IMPORTANT THINGS in both bowls. Stressors and unexpected BAD THINGS get to jump to the head of the line and can knock bowls out of your hand.. and then you have to either hold onto those stressors instead or deal with the stressors and make it go away in order to pick up a bowl of VERY IMPORTANT THINGS.
My suspicion is that we as a society have too many stressors and too many bowls.
I don’t have a fix for this.. I am just starting to recognize it and come up with ways to work around the issue.
So far my personal choice has been somewhere between “deal with stressors to get them out of my hands” and “get the bowls to be ok without direct attention” and “cycle more quickly through all the bowls giving them a little bit of time”. The first method is an ongoing battle. The second is a bit dangerous. Sometimes an “ok on its own bowl” falls over when I’m not looking(eg. bills are all on autopay, I don’t need to look at those. This works until I have an unexpected bill or credit cards expire) . The third is extremely tiring. Concentrating on one bowl is much easier.
It’s a work in progress.
