Balance

Over the last few years, I feel like my life has lacked balance in many ways. In general, maybe, my personality lacks balance. I tend embrace life's extremes (hopefully not in a bipolar-kind-of-way, but in an exuberant-kind-of-way). The last five years of my life have been extreme. Graduated, married, moved, job changes, baby, motherhood, moved again.

I'm finally feeling settled. For the first time in my life, I'm living in a place with no end in sight. Up until now, my life has been divided into stages: university, Peace Corps, grad school, the Doctor's residency. Each stage had a finite life-span, a time when it was definitively over and it was time to move on.

But now, here I am. And I feel settled. I feel like I am sliding into my life, sinking in. The knowledge that I could live here for ever (or not) is comforting. This isn't a stage, this isn't a phase, there is no end in sight. It just is. This is my life.

And I am filling my life with bounty. I have a job that excites me, a child who inspires me to be better and stronger, even as she becomes her own person. I have the time to both work and cook, to do and create. I am enjoying summer and food and monsoons and rest. I am balancing my family, my work, my passions and my loves.

For the first time, I really understand how life is about the journey and not the destination.