Life Is All About Balance

Life is all about balance.  Be kind, but don’t let people abuse you.  Trust, but don’t be deceived.  Be content, but never stop improving yourself.  ~Unknown.

Whether you’re going slow and easy, or you’re running hard and fast, you must maintain a balance in your life.  If you can’t find a balance, you burn out–quick.  Trust me, I speak from experience.

You can’t work all the time.  Sometimes you must rest.  You have to get away from work every now and then or you’ll suffer burnout.

It’s the same way with other things in life.  Things like kindness, trust and self-contentment must all be balanced.

I consider myself a kind person.  I’ve never had to work at being kind because that’s the way I was raised.  We were taught to live a life a kindness and to spread it around.  And that is how I lived as a younger girl and that is how I live today.

The problem with living a life of kindness is that people tend to know that you are a very kind person.  And there are some people who will abuse your kindness.  I thank God that there are more truly kind people in the world than those who abuse others’ kindness, but they do exist.

When I was in the non-profit world I wrote a lot of grants.  And I was very blessed to be awarded a lot of the grants I wrote.  If you’ve never been around grant writing, you may not understand the amount of work that goes into a large grant.  They required months of planning and months of writing.

I was once part of a large grant-writing process in which I was not the lead agency on the grant.  I was there to lend support in specific areas of the grant process.  A group of people were divided up and each group was given a specific section of the grant to write.  The leader of this particular process asked me stand aside and look at each group and see where I could best offer to help.  I did exactly as he asked.  I decided I was going into the “Evaluation” team.  They needed the help.  But when I got there, a good two hours into the process, I was the only one writing.  I pushed my chair back, and gently explained that they had to contribute–that they had to write their own grant evaluation process.

Their comments were, “But Charity, you need to write it because you’ll get it funded” and “We don’t know how, Charity…will you write it for us…?”

I stood up from the table and asked to talk to the guy in charge out in the hall.  Instead of the situation getting better, it got worse.  He, too, thought I should write the grant for them.

I felt misled and as if my kindness had been abused.  I left the meeting and sent an email withdrawing from the process.  Everyone in that room had known me.  And they knew that I had been invited to “help”, but I was really there to do it for them.  They did not win the grant.

Always, always strive for kindness, but never, ever let it be abused.  Find and keep your balance.

Trust is a hard one.  We have to be able to trust.  Life is an emotional roller-coaster if you can’t trust anyone.

I tend to live under the mantra of “Trust until it’s been proven that you can’t”.  I do my best to stick to this.

Trust is one of those things that once gone, it’s almost impossible to get back.  When someone betrays your trust, it’s up to you whether you decide to trust them again.  It is totally your heart and soul that must be willing.  But what about for other people?  Because one person betrayed your trust, do you find it hard to trust anyone and everyone?

That’s where my mantra comes in, “Trust until it’s been proven that you can’t”.

You also have to listen to your gut when it comes to trust.  If your gut tells you that someone is not trustworthy, listen.  Give that person some space.  Their true colors will come out.  Find and keep your balance.

As we get older, we tend to be more self-content.  We’re happy where we are in life.  And that’s a very good thing.  But don’t get so content that you stop improving yourself.  I pray every day to be a better person than I was yesterday.  That helps me find and keep the balance.

Sending balanced blessings to you from Sterrett, Alabama!
Charity