The Balancing act, some thoughts.

I find that I've been getting overwhelmed quite easily recently, life gets busy! There is lots happening now that Fall is here and the year is starting to wind down. Craft shows, Thanksgiving, birthdays, Halloween and scarily enough Christmas are all getting much closer. Eep! So I've been thinking a lot about the balancing act that life can become, and in trying to figure out how to balance all it can sometimes start to freak me out even more! Am I alone in this? I think not, especially in light of conversations I've had recently with fellow crafty ladies and those working for themselves. Then, in the middle of all my thinking and worrying came two fantastic posts by Lauren over at The Boss of You blog, called The Balance Myth (pt.1 & pt.2) that so completely spoke to how I was feeling. Please, please read them. Hearing someone else talk about how they feel the exact same way as I did was so good! Especially when that someone is a person that I not only greatly admire, but totally imagined was balancing everything perfectly. I'm sure that these perceptions of others play a large part in my/our feelings of inadequacy because there are so many other fantastic bloggers and the like, who seem to have it all together! When, the reality is we're all viewing only certain parts of those people, only what they chose to show us. I'm not saying that its dishonest or that they're trying to trick us, because we all do it. We all edit and make decisions about what we give others to see about ourselves, both online and in real life. While it can be hard to remember, we have to remind ourselves that they are all real people just like us, with unfolded laundry, unfinished projects, unpaid bills, unanswered emails, etc. And that's ok.

So, while I am definitely going to be taking Lauren's advice in pt. 2 of her post about helping to stay organised and balanced (especially the twitter one, how easy that can become overwhelming) one of the most important things I've learnt from my thinking, discussing and reading Lauren's blog posts, is letting go. Both letting go of thing I don't actually have to be doing (but have made up in my head that I should be, or that I have taken on but secretly don't actually want to be doing) and also letting go of the worry when things don't all get done. I really want to be living in the present (hippy-ish, I know) much more than I have been and enjoying the day to day rather than getting uptight about what is or isn't getting done.

Any thoughts?