Balance is one of those words we reach for in times of chaos, as if it might offer a neat solution.
But in the past couple of weeks, living alongside trauma, or supporting people who are in it, balance has not looked neat at all.
It has looked heavy, layered, and deeply confusing.
I have found myself moving between worlds.
One moment on the phone with people who have lost homes, animals, livelihoods and their sense of safety.
The next, hanging up and being met with questions about dinner, requests for play dates and TV shows, or complaints about the wifi.
The contrast can feel jarring.
Everyday concerns suddenly seem trivial, almost inappropriate, yet they are still part of life and still need tending to.
My own energy has narrowed.
Right now it feels like all I can truly give is to my immediate family and to the practical and emotional work of supporting those in the path of the fires.
Everything else feels distant, like background noise.
I am not uninterested. I am simply spent.
A friend of mine is walking a similar line.
Her partner has lost his home and spent days doing the unthinkable, having to put down livestock he had raised and cared for as the fire moved through.
She has voluntarily worked in multiple capacities to help our affected community and when she returns to her parents’ family home, she slips back into the role of organiser, carer, the one who orders dinner and keeps things moving.
She is holding everyone, when in truth she is the one who needs to be held.
It makes me wonder how people in emergency services, healthcare, and frontline roles do this every day.
How do you carry other people’s grief and shock, then step back into normal life as though the weight has not changed you?
Do you compartmentalise, placing sorrow in one box and routine in another?
Or do you allow the worlds to blur, trusting that the ordinary will eventually soften the edges of the extraordinary?
The other night I overcooked eye fillet, which for the record, I never do.
I immediately felt guilt, and frustration at myself for getting distracted before quickly self-correcting.
How privileged are we, really, to even afford that meat to cook, in a kitchen, in a house that is standing and filled with family members who are alive and well.
Perspective has a way of arriving uninvited in times like this, quietly rearranging what matters, what can wait, and what is entirely irrelevant.
Perhaps balance, in moments of collective or personal trauma, is not about giving equal attention to everything.
Perhaps it is about permission.
Permission to be tired.
Permission to care deeply.
Permission to let some things slide.
Permission to accept comfort as well as give it.
Life does not pause its daily rhythms when disaster strikes.
Children still need dinner. Dogs still need walking.
The phone still rings.
But beneath all of that, something tender is asking to be acknowledged.
The truth that even the strongest among us are not meant to carry it all alone.
And that sometimes, the most balanced thing we can do is admit that we are not okay, and allow ourselves, finally, to be held too.
20°C