What happens when you fall off the balance wagon?

Myth-busting, week 2! This week, it's all about putting the solutions to the myths into practice.

It is inevitable: you will fall off the balance wagon. Work will begin to take over again. I speak from experience, but you know this just as well as I do.

On weekends, you'll start rationalizing away your Sunday mornings as free time for grading, writing, answering e-mails. "Only an hour," you say. "Just five more minutes." Next thing you know, the entire weekend has been used for work.

Or you'll start giving up your dailies. "It's only ten minutes of Tiny Yoga, I can skip it and do an hour tomorrow." Maybe you go back to eating takeout most nights out of the week because you're too busy to cook. Maybe your weekly Artist Date bites the dust, or worse, your date with your partner.

When you realize this is happening, or when someone points it out to you, you will probably get upset. "I swore that wouldn't happen again," you'll think.

When you fall off the balance wagon, just do three things:

Forgive yourself

Go back to your dailies

Pick up the balance again tomorrow

The worst thing you can do is beat yourself up, so don't allow yourself the luxury of wallowing in the fact that you lost sight of your balance. Instead, go easy on yourself, and go back to those little things that feed your soul on a daily basis. If you stopped writing your dailies into your planner, pick it up right now and write in your dailies for tomorrow. Then just pick it up from there when you wake up, and don't waste your time on yesterdays. Try taking Ralph Waldo Emerson's poetic advice to move on:

Write it on your heart

Write it on your heart
that every day is the best day in the year.
He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day
who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.
Don't waste your time on yesterdays
Finish every day and be done with it.
You have done what you could.
Some blunders and absurdities
no doubt have crept in;
forget them as soon as you can.
Tomorrow is a new day;
begin it well and serenely
and with too high a spirit
to be cumbered with
your old nonsense.
This day is all that is
good and fair.
It is too dear,
with its hopes and invitations,
to waste a moment on yesterdays.

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