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!)
6 Comments
Thank you, Pat. Perfectly timed, as usual!
Interesting. Problem is, it’s so hard to let go. We can’t even keep everything in our memory cause it gets overloaded too. Life is so funny but fascinating.
Time has a way of gently removing some of our eggs, by putting them in storage. They may still be there but they have perhaps decreased in size and importance over time. We can look at them and say “Oh yes, I remember that egg.
Lea, what a good perspective! I realize that time has indeed had an impact on what eggs are no longer important in my life and I didn’t have to consciously make that decision. Thank goodness for our subconscious!
Sometimes it’s not a matter of how many CAN I hold, but how many do I really WANT to hold. In general I don’t want full hands now, preferring to leave some room for surprises that I can grasp without losing others. For now, anyway.
Fay, your perspective intrigues me! And I think it’s a good one, though I hadn’t thought of it before. I, too, am at a point in my life that fewer eggs will allow for surprises.