The Art of Juggling Flaming Bears
Posted under: Duty – a dirty, four-letter word
So I have a lot of responsibilities.
I’ll bet you do, too.
My major responsibilities are thus : Work, Family, Health, Friends, Writing.
Your list may or may not resemble mine, but I’d like you to take a moment to actually build your list (particularly if you’ve not built such a list in the past, and thus don’t know your primary responsibilities).
Crusty Jugglers
Now, I’d like you to imagine each of those responsibilities as differently-sized balls, and you the performer who needs to juggle them.
Probably an easy-to-imagine mental image.
Now, instead of balls, I want you to imagine them as bears. Bears that are on fire.
In some ways, this is closer to the truth than the ball analogy.
My Bears
My biggest bear (and the one which, if I drop it, WILL lunch forward in a flaming fury and eat me) is my work.
I’d love to tell you in a sweeping romantic fashion that my husband is my greatest priority, but REALISTICALLY, if I don’t have a job, neither of us eats or has a roof over our heads. I don’t get to stop working when it’s no longer fun. Work is my biggest, scariest, meanest, most flammable bear.
Juggling a single bear (let us not forget that these bears are ON FIRE) should be considered feat enough, but very few of us have only the one bear.
I have my family. Yes, I love my family. No, I don’t consider my husband to be a bear (incendiary or no). However, a relationship takes time and effort. I don’t take him for granted, nor he I. We make time for each other, we spend time together, and we make an effort to appreciate each other. Time + Importance + Effort = Flaming Bear.
Dropping my family bear is not an acceptable action.
My next bears are friends, gaming, and writing.
Dropping the Bear
Sometimes I need to drop these bears. There are times when I lose my balance or the other bears snarl ferociously and I have to scramble to keep them in the air – and these smaller bear cubs of responsibility are often the first to fall.
Other times, I’m able to keep all of my bears in the air.
Sometimes, I want to drop all of my bears, crawl into a corner, and hide from the world. The effort of trying to juggle them all feels so incredibly VAST that I just want to shove my fingers in my ears and pretend they aren’t yowling for attention just outside my reach.
On those days, it’s difficult to pick the bears back up and get back to the business of juggling.
Flaming Bears … of Love
On those days, I need to remind myself that I LOVE these bears. They aren’t my enemies, they are my CHOICES. My passions, my life.
That writing bear? The one I am so quick to drop whenever the work bear gets so heavy that my arms ache and my thighs burn from the effort of keeping it aloft? I love that writing bear. I CHOSE that bear. I picked him out of a line of adorable half-formed cublets because something about him made my soul sing. I want to stuff him full of raspberries and fish until he’s fit to burst. I want him to grow strong and healthy. (You know, even though he’s on fire)
My gaming bear? He keeps me sane. He’s important not just because he allows me to de-stress and relax, but because he actually makes the friend and family bears lighter and easier to juggle. While we’re out killing internet dragons, we’re spending time together and affirming our friendships.
The Secret
That’s the key, I think. Finding ways to blur the lines between your bears so that each individual bear isn’t QUITE so heavy, nor QUITE so flammable. Some of my friends share my love of writing. Some share my love of gaming. When I game with my husband and my writer friends, I find my three smallest bears to be a JOY to juggle.
Your Bears
Tell me about your bears. How do you juggle them? Do you have any advice, any words of wisdom to those of us who signed up for juggling lessons but didn’t realize we’d be handed a snarling, flaming mammal and told to “snap to it”?
Family, work, health, happiness
You singed up for lessons? i’m jealous!
It seems like so many of my bears are holding hands, making it even more difficult to juggle them . If I put one down, it drags the others along with it. BOO.
So sad that one of your bears has to be health. I think that should be the sort of bear that leaves folks be. (not that they ever ask me what I think)
I read books to keep my bears at bay sometimes. I can’t do it too much (I need those bears) but it helps.
Yeah. dumb health bear. with all the headaches a few years ago, then a crappy pregnancy, and now PPD – it’s just something that I’ve got to be aware of. That’s the grabby bear. the one that holds onto all the others.
I’m pretty sure life owes you like … at least a decade of good health at this point.
I think the biggest bear I juggle is the bear of sanity.
After years of juggling bears, I am finding it harder to remain sane and happy with the juggling act. Some days I just want to step back and watch the bears collide, explode and turn to embers.
In the meantime, I just keep juggling. Most days I am even really aware that I am juggling anymore, until I get tired. Or until someone interrupts my juggling and asks me to juggle some of their bears. Or an asteroid comes crashing out of the sky that I need to pick up.
It was a lot easier and more fun to juggle when I was young, pretty, only responsible for myself, and smart. The bears were more controlled, and actually juggled on their own frequently. I think they were smarter as well.
Eeek, don’t say that. I keep thinking the bears will get easier as I age, not STUPIDER.
Bleh.
Incidentally, I’m pretty sure you’re the same person as Tiffany Aching from the Terry Pratchett books. CRIVENS!
That’s just another reading assignment.
When I was young and beatutiful, my boss would frequently say things along the line of “You’ll understand when you get to be my age.”
But I was 24, had gotten a degree, a job, bought my first car, was in a good relationship, was fiscally prudent and beautiful. What else was I going to accomplish in my life? What insanely magical things were going to happen to me in the next eight years (he was 31) that would change my life, prespectives, thought processes or beauty? I mean, really! How absurd. There was no difference between the two of us; his responsiblities no greater than mine.
No, the bears don’t get smarter. They stay flaming bears.
And you will need reading glasses someday in your forties.
And sometimes people who are even just a few years older than you DO understand things better.
And beautiful is short-lived.
I’m actually kind of looking forward to the reading glasses.
Beautiful is overrated and too strictly defined.
And I never use age as a determiner of wisdom, either positive or negative. =]
This was the music running through my head while reading your post. The music won.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQQS0ZHy6Uk
That was … what the heck WAS that? That was awful. I kept expecting Cartman to pop out and make a joke. That wasn’t someone singing like a real song, was it?
Also, what was that kid doing? It looked like they were trying to pick up that stone column.
My brain is afire with the WRONGNESS of that commercial.
The song is from Arrested Development, but I couldn’t find a good clip, so I had to settle on the commercial. It’s a song about juggling. In the show, they use it in a training montage for a father/son triatholon (turns out to be for little kids).
My comment got way too long. Here you go: http://tedthethird.blogspot.com/2011/10/flaming-bears-of-love.html
Ted´s last post ..Flaming Bears of Love
I like my bears. They can be a pain to feed and care for sometimes, but they let me ride around on their back or hug them or show them off. And they certainly don’t mind when I write about them! :D
*grin* Always good to come to terms with responsibilities!
Other people’s beauty is overrated and too strictly defined….but MY beauty was not overrated and too strictly defined and MY beauty has suffered over time, which I was so sure only happened to OTHER people’s beauty.
Ah, I see. I’ll try not to compare your beauty to that of others, then.