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Bearing Burdens

 horse carrying bags of sack

I woke up this morning with a full to-do list already scheduled. As the day progressed, more items were being added to my plate: calls, meetings, emails, etc. All normal stuff, but I found myself trying to figure out how I would balance the day and get everything done. I was spending increasingly more mental effort on how I would complete the entire list of tasks and leaving less energy to focus on the task at hand.

Maybe I am the only who one suffers from borrowing trouble at times, but I doubt it, so I will unpack this for just a moment. When we try to bear burdens not yet on our shoulders, we waste precious energy and jeopardize that which we are carrying in the moment. Now, I am not against planning and prioritizing, but sometimes we must narrow our focus to what is imminently important in the moment, and temporarily block out what we can worry about later.

We must plan for the future but engage in the moment. It’s a delicate balance. And when the former begins to sabotage the latter, we know we’ve lost that balance. Especially when the “planning” starts to feel more like stressing, as it was threatening to do for me this morning.

Remember, when you try to focus on everything, you end up focusing on nothing.


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