Marion Freijsen A blog about Sports, Fitness & Health

Pain in the backside…

It literally is a pain in the bum….

Sometimes, you cannot balance everything that is going on in your life – and I have found that out yet again. Of course, I have had times in my life before where I was struggling to keep an equilibrium between work, play, sports, family, friends and so on.

You may be different, but it took me a good number of years to figure out that “balance” doesn’t mean that every moment, or even every day is in perfect balance. But more that there has to be balance over the course of your life. Right now, I am working 14-15 hours a day getting our new business (www.efactor.com) off the ground and ofcourse that isn’t so very balanced and doesn’t allow me much time for instance to see my friends or do a number of other things that I love. But I am not too bothered about it, even though my mother of course tells me I work too hard (don’t they always!)… because I know that maybe in a year from now, I have achieved some of the goals I set myself for work and I will be able to do something else that I can’t now.

So Balance is a matter of getting it right over a number of years, knowing that if you focus on one thing now, you can’t necessarily focus to the same degree on the other 3 important matters in your life. At the same time though, always giving those key matters enough attention that they don’t walk away completely. Not too much of a threat in case of your pets or garden or house, but serious threat in terms of your friends or even your partner!

Even with my working hours, I do find a balance that works between relationship, work, sports and social. And then something else happens in your life, and you suddenly find yourself having to restore a new balance – in my case, the fact that someone close to me died out of the blue meant that my focus had to shift overnight from work to family. And being the person I am, doing everything 110%, I was literally putting 30 hours into a 24 hour day thinking I could be everything for everyone.

It took 11 weeks exactly for my body to tell me that this wasn’t “balanced” anymore – that however invincible I think I am, I needed to take a deep breath and figure out a new balance in my life. And the amazing thing in life is that it tells you in no uncertain terms, with the clearest analogies you can imagine… earlier this week as I was squeezing in a quick tour around the woods before doing A, B, oh yes, and quickly adding Z (all of which I was thinking about as I was out there and should have simply been enjoying the scenery) and I stumbled in the mud, and strained both hamstrings simultaneously literally leaving me having to slow down, sit down and take stock.

So here I am, literally with pain in the backside, pondering life and finding a new balance. All is not lost though – with time to think, I have already thought of at least a 100 bright ideas that I can put into execution the moment I can start running around again

Life itself is definitely the greatest Teacher.