Work in progress

Ok I'm owning up to it...I failed the blog challenge.  I'm making no excuses.  I knew how busy I am when I agreed to be part of this, yet still thought I could pull it off.  My problem, when it really comes down to it, is balance.  I do a lot of things.  And even of the things that are all somewhat related, each has their own set of priorities, requirements and obligations.  I think usually what happens is that something comes up and I have to focus all (or at least most) of my energy on one particular thing to the extent that the rest of the things I do fall by the wayside and suffer....and then I have to play catch up and let others things take the back burner....and the cycle just keeps going.  I know that I am an extremist by nature...meaning, that when I think something is wrong I go to the complete far opposite extreme to attempt to fix it...which of course only creates other new and exciting problems....aaaaannd you see where I'm going with this.  

Last summer (2009) I was asked to set a piece on a group of dancers for the the Oklahoma Contemporary Dance Festival.  At the time I was in a walking cast for an ankle injury that I had made worse by not taking time off when I should have, and was, in the most literal sense, dealing with issues of balance.  Below is the link to a video of the piece (the quality is bad, but you can get the gist), and what I wrote that was included as a program note:

"I believe in constantly striving to find balance. There is danger in living at either extreme of almost anything. Whether true balance can ever be attained is something I have yet to find out, but I believe if I ever quit trying to find it then I will truly be lost."


It always kind of weirds me out to read stuff that I wrote long enough ago that I feel I'm in a different mindset now...especially when it's really similar to something I'm currently dealing with.  It kind of makes me feel like I don't make as much progress as I like to think I do.  But I guess that's even the point of what I was saying both then and now...I have to always be working towards becoming who I need to be.  Maybe it's not possible to really figure things out in this life, but if we give up trying to then there's really no point in moving on at all.