Keeping things in focus

I haven't really thought about it in this way before, but I think one of my problems over the last six months or so has been the inability to keep sharp focus on several things at one time. My sister refers to this as 'too much going on' and sometimes 'having too many balls in the air' but my geeky science head thinks it's almost as though life has been more like using a microscope.

If you choose to look at an object under a microscope, say a nice little cell (after all, they are enthralling!), you can see, by selecting the correct objective and then adjusting the focus, different parts of the whole, and even go deeper and deeper to get right there to the bit which interests you most. But, you'll soon figure out that using your microscope at high power is rather more of a challenge than using it at lower power, which gives you the bigger picture in your field of view, but you see it in far less detail.

At high magnification, you really have to concentrate to bring that one specific fascinating thing into focus in the first place and then keep that teensy-tiny fine detail in focus. And doing this comes at the expense of all that other interesting stuff in the periphery! It's also all too easy for one tiny nudge to instantly wreck the view you'd carefully worked towards.

Weight loss (or maintenance) and fitness, as I guess we can probably all agree, requires constant mindfulness, concentration, consistency and hard work, so is a bit like using your microscope with high power magnification.

I've mentioned on more than one occasion that there has been (er, still is!) a lot going on in life and it's been this way for a looong while. Family and health concerns have been, and continue to be, a huge worry. Since Christmas, with the onset of those training courses, things got even tougher. There has just been too much in my big picture to get everything in focus at one time.

While my focus should, in an ideal world, have been on looking after 'me', life's priorities were no longer truly mine to assign. There were other things which I was forced to pull into high magnification focus... at the expense of some of the 'peripheral' stuff, however interesting that might be. For much of the time it simply wasn't possible to lower the magnification to cater for that big picture in less detail, so something has to give. I guess it's been my focus on the weight loss and fitness.

I hope that finishing my coursework early (mirabile dictu) will have helped shake off one of those imposed 'fields of view', and that I may now be able to focus more on something of my own choosing. Let's see what happens, eh.

Whatever the case, I'm not giving up!