Spinning Plates

I feel completely overwhelmed at different points in my life. This season happens to be one of them. I feel like that entertainer who has all of the plates on poles and has to keep them all spinning or everything will come crashing down. I’m actually having a reoccurring dream that the floor is failing out from under me. Not good…

It’s a bit unnerving, but I thought I’d share because we all get there. We all have seasons where we want to crawl back in bed, pull the covers over our head, and eat a box of donuts. Ironically the Homola family dropped off donuts yesterday, so that didn’t help in my temptation to bury my struggles in sugar and dough.

Seriously though, what do I do when I feel this way? I do SOMETHING. I may not be able to get to all of the emails, but I answer a few. I may not be able to make everybody happy, but I reach out to one. I may not be able to give my kids a bath on the right night, but I can take 5 minutes to tell them how much I love and believe in them.

The reality is that being incapacitated by our fear and pressure only makes it worse. Ironically we can get so afraid of failing and letting people down that we do nothing and then fail and let people down anyway.

I think this issue is the defining line between living a mediocre life and an extraordinary one. Incredible people are not the ones who keep going during the easy times. Incredible people are the ones who keep going when they don’t want to and have to dig deep within themselves to resist quitting. It’s that simple sometimes.

So now my strategy is to make a big list, get help with what I can get help with and accomplish a little bit at a time. The big picture is too much, but one thing at a time will eventually add up to something monumental. And a donut or two along the way doesn’t hurt either…