One of my retirement goals is to spend more time with my parents. My mom and I are taking a weekly pottery class. Have you ever “thrown pots”?
In my mind “throwing pots” is a lot like life. You may want life to be neat and organized as my wheel is in the photo above.
But in reality life is more like the picture below. Messy and imperfect. The bowl I made is not perfectly round and one side is thicker than the other. That is because the clay was not “centered” on the wheel when I started to make the bowl.
Centering the clay is the first step in pottery. It is a critical step. If the clay is not centered then nothing else will go well. The clay gets unbalanced. The sides of the bowl start to oscillate and one side of the bowl gets thicker than the other. The thin side might cave in. One side of the bowl may get higher than the other. The more uncentered, the worse the outcome.
This started me thinking about how throwing pots is like life. If we are uncentered, or unbalanced, our lives don’t feel right. We can get unhappy or depressed, our relationships or our health suffer. We might not get enough sleep, we might eat unhealthy foods, we might get angry or frustrated easily and take it out on someone close to us.
Are you centered? Take a strategic pause and think about your answer to this question.
You may not be centered on a daily basis but how centered are you over the course of a week?
This week, practice mindfulness. Pay attention to how you spend your time and to your feelings. Awareness is the first step towards creating a more balanced life.