balancing effort with surrender

A kernel of wisdom from the DVD I was using for my morning yoga practice: at its heart, yoga is about balancing effort with surrender.

Which sent my mind down a path and distracted my focus from the rest of my yoga practice ...

Maybe ALL of my life is about balancing effort with surrender. After all, too much effort and I burn out and fail to enjoy what is all around me - fail to enjoy being alive. But too much surrender and I passively accept things that are not good for me or others and ultimately fail to exercise my aliveness.

This struggle to find the balance point has played out in all my major life challenges. In fact, the core seems to be how much do I accept myself and my life just the way they are and how much do I work to improve myself and my life? Some things should not be accepted just as they are, which is why I have worked hard on anger-management skills, on a healthy balanced diet, or keeping a clean bathroom. On the other hand, I do have to surrender to the fact that I will never be "perfect" emotionally, that sometimes I will err on the side of eating too much, and to the fact that my family likes to leave their toothbrushes balanced on the edge of the bathroom sink.

I am fond of comparing myself to Sisyphus, the figure from Greek mythology who was doomed to push a rock up a hill in Hades every day, only to see it roll back down again so he could do it again. This was his punishment for something or other that had offended the gods ...

As tragic as that may seem, it is sort of just life. Life, all life, is the struggle to create order out of chaos, and to fight off the inevitability of the pull of entropy. Matter is always moving toward greater chaos, unless energy is put into the system. It's my energy - my effort that creates this unnatural state of order, ever-so-temporarily. (Or, to be even more correct, as a consumer it is the energy that I take from the breakdown of what some other creature had organized as a physical body). And, someday, I will have no choice but to surrender to entropy, as I literally cease to exist as an organized being when I die.

Well, that was the little mind journey I took this morning. It's so good when the kids sleep in a bit and let me have this morning time to myself! Because now I am physically and mentally ready to go tackle all that entropy, and to roll that rock back up the hill for another day.