Out of Balance

As a child, I loved to get the see-saw stuck perfectly balanced in the middle.  I loved how a heavier person could scoot up and a lighter person could scoot back to achieve balance.

In my adulthood, I still love it at the playground.  I would love it even more in my life. 

Balance in my life is more like a mathematical average than a teeter-totter stabilized in mid-air.  Chas's third grade math reminded me recently that there are four ways to look at average.  I'll refresh your memory:

MEAN--In a data set, the sum of all the data points, divided by the number of data points.

MODE--The number (or numbers) that occurs most frequently in a set of data.

MEDIAN--The middle number in a data set when the data are put in order.

RANGE--The difference between the largest and the smallest numbers in a data set.

I achieve balance in my life by overloading our lives with activities and then retreating to nearly zero in the hopes that when you add them together and divide by the number of years, we will have achieved the all elusive balance. 

If 10 is insanity and 0 is the number for hermits, I'm trying to hit a mean of 5.  Last Fall there were 6 soccer practices, 4 church activities, 3 music lessons, 1 gymnastics class, and 8 swimming lessons, plus school every week.  To average this out, I plan to do nothing until they leave home. 

The MEAN of our lives is 7.5.

The MODE of our lives is tidying the disaster created by the mean.

The MEDIAN is food.  No matter what order you put the data in, the median is always people hungry or people disliking the food in front of them or both. 

The RANGE is 18 hours, not including the outlying data points of 2 am bad sleepers in our bed. 

I sense that the balance is off a bit again.  I yearn for that see-saw suspended in the air.  I'm just not sure if I need to scoot forward or back. 

In the mean time, I guess I'll enjoy going up and down.  It can be pretty fun as long as the weight at the bottom doesn't bail and you're left with a sore tush. 

"Remember, too much of anything in life can throw us off-balance. At the same time, too little of the important things can do the same thing."  (Elder Russell M. Ballard)