8 ▫️ if you want to sing out, sing out

Hello! It's been a long time since I've written on this platform, and it's nice to be back. Looking back at my last post, it literally was a different world when I closed Chapter 2 of Live.Learn.Blog. Day 48 of the shelter-in-place and I wrote that things were lightening up?? Ah, the humbling power of hindsight. And now, over five years later, we are finally out of that pandemic and into...whatever this is; what will we think about 2025 when we look back on it?

Maybe it's for that reason that I'm back to kick off Chapter 3. The last two chapters have been all about me (sorry, readers): my journey toward writing and finding my place in my art, and my attempts to define home when I was feeling home-less, even though I had a roof over my head and family and friends around me. With Chapter 3, I am turning a new page, literally and figuratively. This chapter, "The Introspective", is more about how a little self-reflection and thought can help us move forward, whether we're feeling stuck, facing mountain-like obstacles, or wanting to pry ourselves out of a rut. The focus will be on how writing (or creativity in general, if you're not much of a writer) can contribute to making us feel grounded and whole.

I'm looking forward to reconnecting with those of you who have stuck around, as well as meeting new readers who might join us along the way. I hope I'll hear from you--your comments give me a lot to think about and make this process so rewarding. Let me know if anything speaks to you, rubs you the wrong way, or sparks an interest you'd like to explore further together.

Keeping Your Balance: How Art Can Help When Life is a Circus

My husband and I have a saying at home: “Taking care of yourself ensures going the distance”. It means that paying attention to self-care is an investment in our future, not just as individuals, but as partners in life. One’s health (be it physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual) affects the other’s. We take this as a basic principle when scheduling our time each week, or when debating a choice between a little extra work or a little extra break.

While it’s easy to understand the concept and see the benefits of self-care, it’s an entirely different matter to implement self-care as a part of our daily routine. It’s like the difference between understanding the concept and the mechanics of balancing on a tightrope, and actually taking off our shoes, climbing the ladder, and stepping out onto a thin stretched rope. 

Life Balance - How To Stay on the Tightrope

We’ve all seen it: a tightrope walker performing in a circus (we’ll call her Anna) climbs up a ladder on one side of the tent, rubs her hands with talc, grabs her balancing pole, and sets off across the tight wire. The audience below holds its collective breath, willing her to make her way across safely, watching every step and mentally placing their own feet where she chooses to tread. But this is not her first time out. She has been there hundreds of times before, at varying heights, under different conditions, making that tightrope her second home.

Life balance is similar. We are not newcomers to this circus; we wake up here, we live our lives here, we sleep here: this is home. The trick is to keep our balance and make it look effortless. How do we do that?

Look a little more closely at Anna. Imagine what her daily maintenance routine might look like: optimized nutrition, regular exercise, and constant practice. Maybe she has a good partner to rehearse with and confide in. And likely, she has learned to tune out distractions, because distractions literally can be deadly to a tightrope walker.

How does that apply to those of us with our feet on the ground? Well, we’ve probably heard the advice thousands of times: eat properly, get exercise, have a supportive group of friends and family; minimize distractions; try to have a well-rounded schedule. These are awesome guidelines for a balanced life, and honestly, most of us are trying, and are having varying degrees of success. It’s a constant work in progress, right? 

Put a pin in that; we’ll be back later. For now, let’s revisit Anna. We’ll find her at the base of the ladder that leads up to the tightrope. She shakes the tension from her arms and legs, and looks up at her goal. Mindfully, she climbs each rung. Maybe she has a mental ritual that centers her mind on the task ahead, each rung a marker, or maybe it’s as simple as Two steps up, breathe in. Two steps up, breathe out. Step-step, inhale; step-step, exhale. 

What can we take away from this? Here we are, back at home, trying to find balance. We are eating in a healthy way, taking care of our bodies inside and out, and maintaining our emotional health with good friends and family. Is your head in the game? If you’re already covering (or trying to cover) all of these bases, I’m going to guess “yes”—yes, you are in the game. Are you mindfully so? Here’s something that may help answer that question: the Mayo Clinic defines mindfulness as “being intensely aware of what you're sensing and feeling in the moment, without interpretation or judgment”.  (I took the liberty of making that last part bold because I think it’s worth emphasizing.) 

Without interpreting or judging, stop for a moment and think now about what’s on our shoulders as we step off onto the metaphorical tightrope that is life: Diet. Exercise. Positive thinking. Family. Community. Employment. Self-care. Breathing. It’s a lot to carry, right? 

Anna feels the weight of her load as well. Now at the top of the ladder, she steps onto the platform and reaches for the powder bag to prepare her…hands? Why her hands? Her feet are going to be what keeps her upright. But her hands also play an important role here, because they will be holding on to a balancing pole. 

While it may seem that picking up a long, flexible object would add to the challenge, a rope walker uses a balancing pole to make her act easier. According to scienceabc.com, a balancing pole helps in two ways. First, it adds weight below the body’s center of gravity; and second, it increases the body’s rotational inertia. There’s a little bit of science for today… but for those of us not in the world of tightrope-walking, translation: these two factors help bring the walker’s body more into harmony with the tightrope, reducing resistance and rotation.

So adding the weight of a balancing pole actually lightens the load for Anna. It’s worth the investment to carry a little something extra.

Therein lies another lesson for us: sometimes, adding a little more weight in the right place and in the right way can help us not just find balance, but maintain it.

Art: The Pole That Keeps Us Balanced

We just took an inventory of everything in our lives (and the list outlined above is rough and by no means inclusive). Is it overwhelming to think about adding one more thing? What if that “one more thing” could help redistribute the weight we’re already carrying? What if it could lower our figurative center of gravity and stabilize us? What if it could reduce that ‘spinning out of control’ feeling, and bring us more into harmony with our lives? It would be a welcome addition, and this is what art can do for us.

When looking for some evidence to back this up, I found this blog on Global Talent Link. It explains it way better than I could:

“One study published by The Journal of Positive Psychology revealed that people who engage in creative endeavors report an increase in positive emotion. The results concluded that engaging in small daily acts of creativity increases our sense of wellbeing and improves positive psychological functioning.”

In addition, the author lists seven ways creativity benefits our everyday lives. Spoiler alert: if reduced anxiety, increased happiness, and feelings of accomplishment and self-confidence appeal to you, you might want to start thinking about what your balancing pole looks like. Are you a writer? A painter? A cook? A musician? A sculptor? A gardener? I could go on and on…and so could you. There is no shortage of creative outlets, and we don’t have to think of ourselves as “a creative” in order to be creative. 

When We Wobble (And We Will)

This isn’t to say, of course, that we will never falter once we pick up our pole and start embracing our inner creative genius. Every one of us will wobble a bit. None of us does it perfectly. But while most tightrope performances go without a hitch, we can be sure that those performers have done their fair share of losing balance, even falling off the wire. So what do we do when we find ourselves losing our balance?

What does Anna do when she feels off-center? She keeps her eyes focused ahead of her, looking to the platform at the far end of the tightrope: her end goal. She refocuses her mind on the task at hand, perhaps evaluating where the wobble comes from. She repositions herself in small increments: a toe or a heel shifted ever so slightly to lend more support. And she probably grasps that balancing pole a little more tightly. 

How can we follow her lead? Every day, we are forced to make decisions about how to spend our time and energy. We all know what it is to shift our priorities depending on the situation, to be in a position where it’s better to give up what we would like to do for what we have to do, for the sake of our end goal. But we don’t have to loosen our grip on our ‘balancing pole’—our creativity, or our art—in order to keep our balance. There are many ways to keep art close to us without sacrificing what absolutely needs to be done, or sacrificing the balance we’ve worked so hard to find. Granted, when things like performance or productivity are a part of the creative process, they may have to find a different place for a time, while other pieces of our lives get our attention. Even the meditative facets of our art may get less time. That doesn’t change who we are or the path we are on, just like Anna’s adjustments don’t change the fact that she’s a tightrope walker. Her wobbles don’t define her. They challenge her, and overcoming the challenges actually serves to strengthen her identity. Anna is an accomplished tightrope walker because she has wobbled, and she's learned how to keep her balance while moving forward. We too become accomplished as we learn to keep our balance amid both subtle changes and more turbulent events, always maintaining contact with both the rope under our feet and the balancing pole in our hands.

Keeping Our Balance, One Step at a Time

Our tightrope walker, Anna, has resolutely climbed her ladder, mounted the tightrope with balancing pole in hand, and adjusted to the teetering and tottering mid-wire. Finally, her bare feet touch the platform on the other side. She takes a humble bow, and the crowd applauds loudly with excitement (mixed with a little relief). It’s a good feeling to watch someone overcome the odds and perform a daunting feat; but how does it feel when we’re the one overcoming those odds? Amazing. Yes, balance is hard to find and hard to maintain. But Anna will be the first to tell you that without that balancing pole, it would have been a lot harder. 

So now it’s time. Get your hands dusty, pick up whatever tool balances you—pen, keyboard, paintbrush, blowtorch—and step off into your life. I can’t wait to see what kind of art you bring to life, and what kind of life your art brings to you! Tell us all about it in the comments below.