And....Stop

Today revealed a chink in my hitherto unchinkable party girl armour, when a week of rubbish sleep, stress at work and too many nights on the sauce finally caught up with me. In a way, I hate days like this, because they show I'm only human, and remind me of my ever increasing age and the fact I can't carry on living at this pace forever. But, on the other hand, they provide me with a rare opportunity to just stop, throw my hands up in defeat and admit I need to step off the social merry go round and REST. It wasn't even that I didn't WANT to go out with my friends tonight, I just physically COULDN'T; my body beat my brain into submission and refused to let me go. And you know what? This evening's been just the tonic. I came home, ran a bath, had a nice healthy dinner, watched TV and painted my nails. Sounds mundane, I know, but when you live the life of a hectic city dweller, you come to covet the mundane, to relish it.

I suppose this desire to just 'stop,' or as I more often say to 'find peace,' is the driving force behind my decision to go travelling (that, and the morbid fear of waking up one day to find I've never really 'lived'). To hell with the recession and the fear of what might happen one, two, five, even ten years down the line, isn't it important to take stock of where we are RIGHT NOW, to live each moment as if it were our last? I suppose this view is also why I feel so drawn to Buddhism, a central teaching of which is 'mindfulness' of how we treat ourselves, each other and our surroundings.

In all honestly I'm not sure how far down the spiritual path I'll get; to truly follow it you need to place little value on material wealth and possessions, and you must have the strength of character to eschew the trappings of a hedonistic lifestyle, which I'm currently failing miserably to achieve. But, that said, this irresistable desire to at least take a few steps along the road is something that I'm finding increasingly more difficult to ignore.

I've used the yin/yang metaphor to describe the two sides to my (and many other people in my position; I certainly wouldn't presuppose to be the only one experiencing it) personality (party lifestyle vs healthy lifestyle) on a number of occasions, but never has it felt so apt as now. I'm a social creature by nature, and partying is FUN, but it's starting to feel like the yin is overtaking the yang and I'm being thrown off balance, finding myself increasingly succumbing to the fatigue such imbalance brings. I can't do things in half measures; I'm either full steam ahead or no steam at all. So for now I will continue to be full steam ahead, partying like its '99 with my friends and living 'city life' to the full. But, come January, when I really have run out of steam completely, I'll be boarding that plane to Borneo with a smile on my face and a lightness in my heart. Time to give the yang a chance to redress the imbalance. Time to take stock. Time to just....stop.