How 'bout I found an adult coloring book?!  It's got birds, flowers, bees and bugs in it.  The bugs disturb me greatly.  But the flowers!  So I colored this here pansy.  When I started coloring, I was all worried that my markers weren't good enough because my kid had made off with my good watercolor pens.  But isn't the whole point of this little "Play Project" to.....PLAY?  So I stopped trying to be an adult struggling with perfectionism and colored with pretty much anything I could find.  Markers, pencils, crayons, highlighters.

As I was coloring, the word "balance" popped into my head.  A pansy is perfectly balanced.  There are several definitions for the word "balance" but my fave is this:

'Mental steadiness or emotional stability; a state of bodily equilibrium.'

Balance is the one thing I struggle with day in, day out.  I'm fairly certain it's my karmic lesson this time around.  As I've gotten older, I've begun to see the importance of balancing the mind-body-soul connection.  Some days I feel like a juggling clown on a unicycle who's just blown a tire and had his arms amputated.  Other days I feel simply zen.  THOSE are the days when I'm perfectly balanced.  Nothing is complicated or rushed.  When I think about having a simply zen lifestyle, part of me feels guilty.  Guilty because I'm not slaving and stressing out over some big project.  But it's usually short-lived.

I'm starting to get the hang of things.  Breathe in through the mouth, out through the nose.  Repeat.