The Tidal Pool of Life

I've blogged about being 'busy' before - but this post is different.

I'm juggling, spinning plates, prioritizing and re-prioritizing.

Food prepping for the week so that I can spend less time in the kitchen nightly -

 which I means I just end up on the computer working instead of cooking.

One day last week I found myself triple booked! What? 

(And yet this is how I function ~ and to be honest..... thrive!)

It's a constant struggle to make finding balance and peace a priority, but I've come to find out I feel a little less whole when detached from life. I need it every now and then yes, and I've learned to respond to those signals of 'slow down' or 'take a break' much better than years past. I can choose music over voxer, an hour more of sleep versus an early morning twitter chat, shutting down the laptop and cuddling with my spouse instead of trying to cram one more hour of work into my long day. Yesterday I was without my phone for a few hours as we changed service. It should have been a blessing - instead I was stressed about the messages I was missing- the work I was not attending to. That's ok though - that's me...

Then one day on FaceBook a school mate from South Africa shared this picture while on his run ~ and this reflection~ and I too was stopped dead in my tracks .....

 Absolute calm amongst the powerful and incessant currents that urge the waves to crash against the wall of the tidal pool.... Evidence that one can experience peace and a sense of calm amongst the challenges that life poses us. 

What initially struck me as an example of calm - led me to this deeper reflection:

There is so much irony in what seems to be a perfectly calm tidal pool. As the water retreats with the turning tides, marine life is abandoned in this pool, trapped infinitely without the larger ocean full of life and resources. They adapt to the constraints of their limited environment. 

To the human eye, this is a peaceful pool without the barrage of the waves. 

It's not necessarily glass half empty, glass half full analogy - but it's a choice of perspective I guess. Would I rather want to live in the ocean with the high and low tide, full of energy and life? Or would I rather adapt to a smaller, quieter life in the pool - away from the chaos of the ocean but also secluded from the bounty of it all? In the reality of the tidal pool - you cannot have it both ways. You cannot simply step in and out of both worlds - it's a sentencing of sorts, yet you don't know when you will be plucked from the ocean to join the tidal pool. Humanly speaking, you do get that choice to retreat, rejoin and create your own ebb and flow of activity.
Perhaps the reflection could be - enjoy the ocean while you can? "life like you are dying" as the song lyrics go.....

I'm leaving this one a bit rhetorical in terms of the direction of the reflection as my mind is a bit distracted by a choice someone made recently.......

But I'll leave you with my initial thought

Your chaos is not my chaos. Your peace is not my peace. The highs and lows of life's tides affect me differently than you - I'll thrive wherever I find home, because I choose life.

Create a tidal pool in your life or avoid getting trapped in one?
Life will crash it's waves with force against you ~
but with each wave comes fresh energy, a surge of life even too small for the human eye to see.

What is a Tide Pool?

The oceans' shores are constantly in motion. They are a mixture of both land and sea and never the same from one moment to the next. The boundary between land and sea constantly changes with the tide's rhythmic rise and fall. When the tide retreats, seawater trapped in depressions in the rocks forms tide pools. These shallow pools and surrounding areas uncovered by the retreating tides are often teeming animals and plants, which must adapt to environmental extremes to survive. Source: http://seaworld.org/animal-info/ecosystem-infobooks/tide-pools/what-is-a-tide-pool/