I believe life is all about balance. I don’t know how it works; I just know it does. If things are really going well, something bad will happen. If things are looking so down that the only way is up, you can bet something good will come along. I couldn’t count the times we had a bill come due, and if we didn’t have the money on hand, somewhere or somehow we would get a windfall to cover it.
One time when we were going through a really tough time, Jim cleaned out his wallet and found a $100 bill tucked away in one of those secret pockets so many wallets have. One day the phone rang and it was a woman calling from a place Jim had worked several years before. They had been trying to locate him to send a vacation check they owed him. The check came in the mail the same day we received a bill for the same amount.
In the past few weeks several things happened to remind me of balance. Thursday night I came home from work to discover a $100 check in the mail for winnings from a writing contest I had entered months ago.
Friday night, I went to a play for an evening of relaxation after a hard week at work. My friend, Cindy, and I had great seats, but I was sitting next to a woman who began to cough. She coughed and coughed. I’m thinking I really don’t want to catch something with a trip coming up soon.
When I got home from the play, I was looking forward to a good night’s sleep. I walked through the door and smelled something burning. I checked the usual suspects: my coffee pot, my curling iron, and my iron. They were all off. Following my nose I headed toward the basement to discover my heat pump was making an unusual humming sound. I checked the vents and no air seemed to be blowing out of them. I turned off the heat pump and tried to figure out what to do. The temperature was already dropping for the night. I called a friend and he said it sounded like it was my fan. He called a repair service and found out that the repair would be overtime whether the repairman came that night or waited until Saturday. The charge was estimated at $300.
The repairman, Steve, plugged my address into a GPS and only called for further directions after he was in my neighborhood. He had the heat pump up and running in no time. It was an inexpensive capacitor and not the fan so the repair came in at just a little more than $100 which pretty much equaled my windfall of a few nights before.
I hope this balance theory works for health too. My blood pressure was great, so I had high hopes that my blood work would be good news for a change too. Every year, my numbers just keep climbing. This year, they lowered the threshold on blood glucose levels, so that number was marked *HI. To top it off, I had a new one crop up. My uric acid levels were *HI also. I know enough to know that uric acid and gout go hand-in-hand.
Most, if not all, of my health problems are caused by the extra twenty pounds I’m carrying around. Aw, but for the good old days when I was merely overweight and not (according to those new lower thresholds again) obese. Another part of my life where I need to find balance is on my scales.
Just like after last year’s health fair, I am determined to lose weight and regain healthy lower numbers. Saturday at my granddaughter’s basketball game, I told my son that I was going to eat just enough to stay alive. Of course, I had just polished off a bag of Doritos because I didn’t have time to stop for lunch and the food choices were quite limited at the game.
“Apparently you need Doritos to stay alive,” he said.
“I think they have to be listed with the other staples,” I agreed.
OK, so maybe I can’t really eat just enough to stay alive and still have Doritos from time to time. I don’t believe in going to diet extremes. In the first place, dieting makes me really cranky. And after I work really, really hard to lose five pounds, I eat one normal meal and it’s baaaaack.
Experts say it’s all about balance. Eat healthy foods, exercise, and the next thing you know you look like a supermodel.
My dad struggled with weight all his life. He often said, “When you go on a diet and never eat the things you like, you may not live longer, but it sure seems like you do.”
Who wants to face life eating only food that is good for you and not food you crave and love? I don’t know about you, but it sure makes me want to eat a bag of Doritos. I would only eat a small bag though because I believe in balance. Oh, yeah, and eating only enough to stay alive.
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