Royal Wedding in Review

At 1:45 this morning I got up, woke everyone else up, whipped up a stack of cucumber finger sandwiches, put platters of "biscuits" (cookies) and chocolate dipped fruits, out on the table, and sat down to watch the Royal Wedding live from London expecting to fall asleep. What followed on television was so riveting to me, so foreign yet so familiar, that I couldn't sleep afterall and didn't doze off until the happy couple arrived at Buckingham Palace - then I was out like a light.

I've been fighting sleep all day, and giving in to sleep with long cat naps, but I don't regret being 'up in the night.' The entire wedding felt like a dream.

I loved the dresses -- Kate Middleton's and her sister Pippa's. I loved the bright green trees inside the Abbey. I loved the brothers, William and Harry, in their regalia, and the queen in her canary yellow suit and hat. I didn't stay awake long enough to see the kisses from the balcony, but I love that there were two of them instead of one and that the crowd roared its approval.

I stayed awake to witness it because I know it will be a memory 30 years from now and I like to make memories for myself and for the people I love.

Keeping a Running Balance

balance (def.)
•a state of equilibrium
•equality between the totals of the credit and debit sides of an account
•harmonious arrangement or relation of parts or elements within a whole
•something left after other parts have been taken away
•symmetry, exact reflection of form on opposite sides of a dividing line

Many years ago I realized the need to keep a running balance in our checking account. The right hand (me) didn't always know what the left hand (Scott) was spending, and back then I couldn't pull up a bank statement online at a moment's notice to see what had and had not cleared the bank, even if I knew what to be watching for. I discovered that when I kept an accurate running balance of our checking account I felt on top of things, no matter how little money was in the account. If I had $38.22, for example, I could breathe easily because I knew where I stood and could make decisions accordingly. I still get a thrill from knowing down to the penny exactly where we're "at," even when (especially when) the funds are drawing low.

Keeping a running balance -- we do it not just in our checking accounts but in our laundry bins and in our kitchen cupboards and sinks and garbage cans and gas tanks; in our sleep-to-waking, work-to-play, and indoor-outdoor ratios.

The point is we are running, and how do you keep anything in balance when you're running?

When I get really excited about something (which can happen every few days, it seems), I tend to go overboard on that one thing while neglecting almost everything else -- certainly everything else that is non-essential. I tend to get out of balance.

The pendulum swings recklessly for a few days -- up until 3am, sleeping mid-afternoon to compensate, barely meeting deadlines...And then I think of the Foucault Pendulum swinging in perfect rhythm in the Eyring Science Center at BYU, demonstrating the steady rotation of the earth.

William Shakespeare said it best: "Were man but constant, he were perfect." But we can't be constant. We can't live in a constant state of equilibrium. If things are momentarily in balance, they will soon be out of balance again, and we will be scrambling to put everything back in order.

I often feel like one of the Chinese plate spinners I saw in the Mulan parade at Disneyland about 12 years ago. Somehow they managed to walk the parade route with multiple plates at the ends of long poles, all spinning and tilting at once, each needing attention.

That's a metaphor for life. Just trying to keep in balance keeps us running.