juggling balls

"Communication is a continual balancing act, juggling needs for intimacy and independence. To survive in the world, we have to act in concert with others, but to survive as ourselves, rather than as cogs in a wheel, we have to act alone."

Deborah Tannen

I am a high-end extrovert and for many years I thrived in crowds and with group communication. But in the past couple of years I've discovered a need for solitude that is diminishing my capacity to be around people constantly. There was a time when a 30 minute window of solitude a day would be enough to empower me to spend the remaining hours with people. Today I need considerably more time alone before I am able to be fully present with others.

Juggling my need for solitude with my responsibility for societal interaction is often a challenge. How much "me" time is necessary to make my "you" time awesome? When do I sacrifice myself for you? And when do I choose to extract myself from you to focus on me?

One of the neat things about juggling is the fact that it is very nearly impossible to juggle well if you are focused on what your hands are doing. The only way to really juggle well is to focus on what the balls are doing and when you get good, all you really focus on is the empty space just above your eye line.

I have a bunch of things I'm juggling right now. Adoption; renovating an old house, leading a college ministry through it's initial growing pains, recruiting a new batch of seminarians for next year's academic year, raising a lot of money, taking a pastoral counseling class, struggling with ill health, continued therapy for PTSD, dealing with sickness and death in the immediate family, mentoring a group of young men and women. The list could go on and on. The point is that there are quite a few big line item issues in my life right now that demand constant attention and energy. When I look at how or what I am doing with my hands these balls just end up dropping. But when I keep my focus on that empty space they have to travel through then I know when each is ready to drop into one of my hands, which then pre-warns that hand to launch the ball it is holding to make room for the rapidly descending ball.

So this morning I'll continue to launch and catch a host of balls, (relationships and circumstances) while always striving to keep my eyes on the empty space those balls have to travel through before they can begin to fall again towards my waiting hands.

I confess there is an almost irresistible urge to check on what the ball is doing or my hands are doing rather than keeping my focus on the empty space. How can I really keep this many balls rotating around myself without them colliding or dropping? Faith in the empty space provided so that I might know when to launch another ball and be prepared to catch the descending one.

For me the empty space is the Christian God and all of the relationships and circumstances my life interacts with must pass through this space.

What is the empty space in your life? Or are you too busy looking at what your hands are doing to find the empty space all of your life must pass through?

Hope your day has some empty space to signal when the next ball needs to be moved into the air or safely caught.....