How many eggs can you hold?

When we are children, we begin to find and collect “eggs”-people, ideas, dreams-that we like to hold in our hands.

As our hands naturally grow larger over time, we are able to hold more eggs. Our youth was a time of curiosity, gathering up and collecting more.

But at a certain point we stop growing and our capacity to safely hold on to any more eggs stops growing with use. Each of us has a finite limit, beyond which, if we take on even just one more, things will start to fall and whatever precious things we are carrying will invariably begin to break.

Once we have reached this moment of fullness, of enough, we can only pick up a new egg if we take at least one from the existing pile in our hands and gently put it down. We must let something go.

It’s difficult to admit to this fundamental human limitation. And then too many precious people and relationships get unintentionally dropped, and some are broken.

At worst, we are forced to drop everything all at once and then try to clean up the terrible mess we created by adding those few extra eggs, at the last minute, in a hurry, without thinking.

Like the number of eggs we can hold, we can only deeply and truly offer our best love and care to a finite number of people, commitments, or goals in one human life.

Too often, most of us discover what is “enough” by racing past it.

• We eat more than we should and then feel queasy and uncomfortable.
• We push ourselves more than our bodies can handle, and then we get sick.
• We take on more work, projects, events, relationships, and then we feel overwhelmed, exhausted, and discouraged.

We need to take a look at the “eggs” we are trying to hold and decide

• which ones are the most important to us,
• which ones we don’t want to drop,
• which ones no longer are needed,
• which ones belong to someone else.

(And sometimes it just takes turning it all off to sort it out!)

What “egg” can you gently set down?

What “eggs” are you willing to set down temporarily?

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