Being pulled apart doesn’t move me forward

Yesterday, I had a great many things on my mind.  Ideas were flowing.  I was feeling creative. I desired a quiet space to put it all on paper.  That was great, but then I thought about my obligation to the conference I am attending and it felt like I was being pulled in a much different direction.  Stretched and torn in two very different directions.  This conflict made me even more uneasy.

At first I thought of the two obligations as being weights on a balance.  Actually, I thought about it as stones in two buckets that were hanging from a pole I held across my back.  The weight, was weighing me down.  It was pressing my shoulders into the ground.  It was keeping my head tilted down, away from the sun, away from knowing the path that lay before me, the only thing I could see was the next step.  And taking a step, any step, made the weight on my shoulders even greater.

The struggle to keep the weights balanced, to attend to them both and to keep them from allowing me to move forward began to be the main burden.  I wanted to write.  I felt obligated to go to meetings.  My desired agenda? My obligation? The more I let the two issues battle, the more they kept me from moving forward in either direction.

Why do we do this to ourselves?  I started wondering where I was, in this balance, between my obligations.  Where did I sit on the see-saw between my obligations and my desires?  I realized that the major burden was that I as trying to serve two masters, the one of my desires that moved me forward to my goals and the one of my obligations that left me feeling stuck and lifeless.  Wow!  That wasn’t a good place to be.

The funny thing was, that I did both.  I wrote for a while and then I found a workshop to go to.  But, I wasn’t really all there because the question kept nagging at me.  Why am I allowing myself to be pulled apart? What can I do to change it?

I realized that I need to pull back and to realign.  To find obligations that move me toward my desires and to let those that don’t, down easy or to give them to someone else to carry.  I realized that my obligations didn’t have to be opposite from my desires and that they could both lead me forward toward my goals.  Now, just to do the work of shifting the course.  The work of realignment.

Wouldn’t our lives be wonderful and carefree if our obligations and our desires were one in the same?  If they all moved us in the direction of our dreams?  I believe they can be, if we keep that in mind.