There are times when my life feels as if I am walking a tightrope over some abyss desperately juggling all those things I feel I have to do before I can rest and enjoy myself. And there are days when it seems that just when I have finally caught all the balls safely someone throws me a curve and I totter precariously off balance. Here I ponder the deep meaning of life and the plumbing acts up! And yes, sometimes I drop the ball entirely and can only watch helplessly as it falls. Ooops, there it goes, the wrong words said, the meeting I did not make, the things I completely forgot to do.

How about you? How many balls are you juggling? Shall we try to list but a few? How about family, work, volunteering, carpooling, care and feeding of animals, computers, mail, bills, plants that need water, extra projects, answering telemarketers, throwing away junk mail, taking out the garbage, shopping, doctors, dentists and other necessary stuff. What happens to those things you are longing to do? Do you find time for friends, walks, hikes, a class to take just for fun or sitting quietly in the garden and doing absolutely nothing? Or are you way too busy?

Time seems to move faster and faster. Or is it actually shrinking? Our concept of time certainly has changed. Once each day of the week had its own flavor. It may be a measure of how much we have lost that sense that the New York Times did an entire series on days of the week (August 21 issue, 1994). They wrote:

For years, centuries even, each day of the week had its own feel to it, as in: "Funny it doesn't feel like Thursday." Now the days feel more and more the same – generic! The days dwindle down to a tepid stew. Saturdays used to mean taking to the open road. (But) now the open road is closed. Weekend traffic is as bad as Tuesday or Wednesday traffic - families use the weekend to do the shopping the wife used to do on weekdays before she got a job. In New Hampshire with its godly white steeples and Daniel Webster wrestling the devil, the state liquor stores are now open on Sunday.

Sundays, the Sabbath, the day of reflection and rest used to be special. Stores were closed and shuttered and there was such a thing as Sunday dinner. You stayed in your church clothes to eat it at the table with the best china, a pot roast or leg of lamb maybe, with mint jelly on the side. Your father carved the roast and as you sat there you had time to notice the dust devils dance in the sunlight. Does Sunday dinner still exist? When I was a child, Copenhagen grew silent on Sundays, traffic died down, and you could hear the church bells even in a city of one million. It was a day of rest. Edward Hopper painted "Early Sunday Morning" in 1930. The sunlight has a certain golden stained glass quality as it falls on a two story red brick buildings that have shops on the first floors, four dark doorways and a barber pole. The shops are closed and they will be closed all day. In Hopper's time Sunday was Sunday with a stately and vacated feeling about it. Emily Dickinson wrote, "There's a certain slant of light" on Sundays that "oppresses like the heft of old cathedral tunes." There was time to get bored.

Nowadays Sunday morning may feel more like the day before your vacation house rental ends. "Friday's opportunities have become Sunday's obligations, unfulfilled. As in the book not read, the garden not weeded. When the weekend began, you were running toward the horizon with your arms out, and now the horizon is crumbling toward you." In houses with children, parents sing an old refrain: "If only, my dear child you'd done it on Friday." There may be arguments about money: "When you spend all day at the mall and don't bring my calculator, how do you think that we..." Fill in the blanks. It is not surprising that late on Sunday evening a disappointed nation is more apt to look for meaning in television.

Time is not quite what it used to be. We may well be a nation out of balance. The German workweek is short, Europeans work only four days per week or an average of 36 hours per week. In the US an employed person puts in 49 hours or more and one in eight put in 60 hours or more. To compare: at the turn of the century we worked 48 hours.

We certainly seem far more stressed. Which is a word that did not use to refer to people at all until 1930. We can blame a young endocrinologist named Hans Seyle for it. This scientist was not only ambitious and a good researcher but also more than a bit of a klutz. He had the bad habit of first dropping his rats, then chasing them around the room, and finally trapping them under the sink before returning them to the cage. When the ragged rats developed ulcers and shrunken immune tissue, Seyle did some tests and discovered that his own clumsiness was making them sick. Looking for a word to describe this situation he took a term from engineering: stress.

Well today some of us could teach the rats a thing or two. We work longer hours than our parents did, on the average an extra month per year. Work is an end in itself. It has for many become the way identity is established, an answer to questions like: "Who am I?" "Where am I going?" Those are religious questions and work as the answer became a new religion. In the 1920's the Economic Gospel of consumerism was born, which said that there is no such thing as enough and that we can continue to produce indefinitely. Listen to this sentence again: there is no such thing as enough! I wonder if that is at the core of our spiritual crisis, this drive to acquire more and more, battered and chased in a harsh economic climate until we feel much like those rats in that experiment.

One can indeed never get enough of what we really do not need, that is the basis of many addictions. We can never get enough is a lie but one that has been repeated so much that many of us at least act as if we believe it. You can, in fact, be both too thin and too rich.

This consumer gospel was a new idea. In the 19th century economists such as John Stuart Mill had taken for granted that as technology advanced, people would be able to satisfy all their needs with less and less labor. What happened instead was that the overwork ethic became so natural and inevitable that it went almost unquestioned. Juliet Schor writes in her book: The Overworked American that the time crunch is real. Individuals are working many more hours today than they had in the past.

Meanwhile we are cramming too much stuff into our dwindling leisure hours: our weekends disappear as we run errands, do the laundry, cook dinner, and pay the bills. And then we feel guilty when we don't stay in close touch with family, keep up with our reading, throw dinner parties, volunteer at the local soup kitchen - not to mention exercise." It does not have to be that way. Perhaps it is not surprising that so many books lately has titles with simplicity in them.

Our very affluence can be a source of stress. Paul Harris writes in Parabola: "My house is furnished with things that need my attention. Most days I get so caught up in trying not to get buried by the waves of things that wash through the house or across my desk, demanding to be fixed or decided or answered or "somethinged", that I don't see beneath the surface."

And it is precisely below the surface, underneath all our business that we can find some measure of sanity and joy. The average home accumulates 300 pages of paper a day according to clutter expert Don Aslett. That is a lot of trees, a lot of resources that will likely end up a landfill. And then there are all the other sources of clutter, toys, shoes, old clothes, crusty paint cans, dented lunch boxes, all those odd gloves and socks separated irrevocably from their partners.

Does clutter make you feel guilty? Do you feel guilty when you look at that dusty Nordic Track or that unused great new yogurt maker? Has self-improvement become another source of self-flagellation which to my knowledge burns absolutely no calories?

It is time to stop. There are ways restore sanity and balance in your life. Some common sense remedies are: Keep a time diary for a week to discover where your time really goes. Make a list of things that are important in your life, then the things you actually spend most of your time doing. Cut back on activities that don't match up with what truly matters to you, things that you have outgrown, or are doing only out of obligation. For your time off choose activities that refresh and give a sense of renewal. Do not collect experiences as if they were possessions. Know your limits!

Make friends and become part of a community. Being connected to other people is an incredible powerful buffer against the ill effects of stress. Even a pet can help.

And loosen up. Some stress is actually good for you. As anyone who has ever had too little to do will know. It can keep our brains working and keep us alive.

But too much stress can also make you sick or even kill. Some stress is unavoidable but you can stop putting so much pressure on yourself. No, you will never be perfect. Decide to have a sane, balanced life. Enough is actually enough.

Some of you I know cannot control your hours without putting your job in jeopardy. What can you do if you are forced to work nearly insane hours? Change your attitude. Nurture a quiet calm inside you and do not allow others to spill their urgency or anxiety onto you. Develop what some researchers call flow, a complete absorption in the activity at hand. If you love what you are doing you may feel a deep sense of exhilaration and clarity. Musicians feel it when they are playing and can no longer say whether they are playing the music or the music is playing them. Chess players get into the flow when they concentrate so much that they do not notice the time passing. John Huggins works in a cramped windowless baker's nook in Relia's garden restaurant in North Carolina near the Nahantula river. Every day he turns out 400 rolls, batches of granola, cakes, pies, muffins, cobblers and cookies all for the benefit of those who come to the mountains to get away. He works long hours under stressful conditions. What makes him unique is that he is determined to enjoy himself in the middle of a thousand distractions. His co-workers describe him this way: "When things get crazy, he can hold it together. People look to him to gain a sense of 'groundedness;' in the midst of whatever chaos is going on. He identifies himself with his work about like an artist does with a canvas." One could say that he has a mindful attitude. He can keep his balance.

Human beings are by their very nature always being pulled in opposite directions. Robert Cole writes: "Even as one pushes oneself toward action, one also calls oneself backwards to contemplation. Within a life, there is a need for some kind of mixture of the two." In our modern life there may not be enough of the latter. Contemplation seems to belong to another era, evoking images of long stone corridors where silent figures dressed in monks' robes pass each other without as much as a glance. Another era and yet I at least feel a deep longing for it. I do not think I am alone. Gregorian chants, meditation music and books or magazines with the word "spirituality" in it are bestsellers. There is a longing of the human soul for meaning, nurturing, purpose, time to reflect that no amount of busyness can fill. The truth is that it does take time to rediscover and explore our own soul. What does your soul long for? This is a question only you can answer and it requires going below the surface "mind clutter." I often imagine a small garden somewhere were one can sit and listen to the sound of water running over stones, awakening to the simple beauty of life as if from a long sleep.

Bede Griffith writes: "One day during my last term at school I walked out alone in the evening and heard the birds singing in that full chorus of song, which can only be heard at that time of year at dawn or at sunset. I remember now the shock of surprise with which the sound broke upon my ears. It seemed to me that I had never heard the birds singing before and I wondered whether they sang like this all year round and I had never noticed it."

How much do we not notice around us and within us? The other day I was stuck in traffic and as I sat there I looked toward the West mountain range where a desert sunset was unfolding. The horizon was on fire with rosy, lavender afterglows and the land took on that dusty, gray, purple tint only found, I think, in the desert. I realized how lucky I was to see all this and with a bit of shame also realized it was the first time in days I actually took the time to watch a sunset. It took a traffic jam to get me to slow down enough to do it. We all wear blinders and get caught up in things. When we do it is as if God or nature put all these gifts, these finely wrapped moments in front of us and we are blind to their beauty and grace. So we never untie the bows. And our souls remain hungry, starving for a touch of the spirit.

Luckily the Sacred, God or the Spirit of Life has a way of shaking us awake. Something small, ordinary breaks suddenly into our lives and catches our full attention like a swift swallow, a lonely bird against the sky and we are mindfully, awe filled aware. Anything that breaks through the routine of daily life, our business and mind clutter may be the bearer of such a message to the soul. When it happens it is as though a veil has been lifted and we see the hidden reality, the true nature behind our chattering monkey minds. David A Cooper writes:

Ego by definition was constructed by erecting presumed boundaries between the self and all that is not the self. This artificial boundary leads to a sense of duality and separateness. Each human being, therefore, has two contradictory principles operating at the core of his or hers essence: "I am somebody, I exist," versus "There is nothing that can be called me - it is all One."

We teeter and totter between these two forms of awareness as we try to keep our balance. The realization that we are all players in this ultimate juggling act can be both healing and freeing.

We need the sense of One-ness with the Universe and we need the connections to others as individual selves join and become a beloved community. Robert Cole wrote in his book The Call to Service: A Witness to Idealism:

I have seen babies in the nurseries, dozing or awake, but very quiet. One of the babies will start crying, in pain of hurting, maybe with colic, and the other children respond with their cries, but their cries are not the cry of pain but rather the cry of empathy in response to someone else's pain. These children are not even old enough to have a language but they respond instinctively to someone else's cry.

Within Jewish mysticism creation results from the dynamic interaction of an infinite will to give - the Bestower - and an infinite will to receive - the Universe. But to give and receive we must first be aware and in the moment. Tich Nhat Hahn, a Vietnamese Zen master, poet and peace advocate gives us this example: "Suppose your daughter comes and presents herself to you. If you are not really there - if you are thinking of the past, worried about the future, or possessed by anger and fear - the child although standing in front of you will not exist for you. She is like a ghost and you may be like a ghost also. If you want to be with her, you have to return to the present moment.

Perhaps we need to change our whole idea of what it means to make a good investment to get back into a sane way of living. Hahn writes, "Even if we have a lot of money in the bank we can die very easily from our suffering. So, investing in a friend, making a friend into a real friend, building a community of friends, is a much better source of security. We will have someone to lean on, during our difficult moments. We can get in touch with the refreshing, healing elements within and around us, thanks to the loving support of other people. (But) to create a good community we first have to transform ourselves into a good element of the community. After that we can go to another person and help him or her become an element of the community. We build a network of friends that way. We have to think of friends and community as investments, as our most important asset..."

How will you keep balance in your life? Be mindful of how you spend your time and energy. Open your heart and soul to the gifts of the moment. Be ready for sunsets. Decide when enough is really enough. Invest in your friends. Take the time to nurture your spirit. Listen, be aware and give to others. And as Joseph Campbell wrote: "Follow your bliss!"

Allow the answers to come to you. And enjoy the juggling!