Life Balance: When Your Body Sets the Pace

My Chronic Life: Entry Five

Progressive neuropathy doesn’t stay in one place. Right now, it’s taken up residence in my scalp, face, hands, and legs. Brushing my hair sends goosebumps cascading down my entire right side. Certain foods trigger numbness that spreads across my face. My lips have so little feeling left that I drool on myself when drinking from a glass. My hands are perpetually half-there, and my feet and lower legs can’t seem to decide: some days they’re numb, other days the lightest touch is excruciating.

After weeks of feeling awful, a good day arrived. So I took it.

I have to take advantage of good days, which feel few and far between. We loaded up as a family and drove out to pick up a new batch of laying hens to add to our flock. On the way home, we stopped at Bass Pro. If you’ve never been, it’s less a store and more an experience. The outside alone stops you in your tracks with moose, deer antlers, and lifelike bears posed mid-stride. Inside, it opens up into something my youngest absolutely wasn’t prepared for. Taxidermy everywhere you look, bears, wolves, foxes, bison, and moose that dwarf everything around them. An aquarium with trout so large they don’t look real. Walls lined with fishing rods, boats, hunting and camping gear, stacked floor to ceiling. He moved through it wide-eyed, pointing at every animal he could name, and already negotiating when we could go fishing before we’d fully made it through the entry. I followed slowly, watching him take it all in, and that was more than enough for me.

Once we were back home, my husband took on building the temporary coop. Alberta had finally decided it was spring, and the warmth I’d waited for all winter was already working against me. Heat makes the near-fainting worse, and the active day had spent me before dinner.

I contributed where my body allowed, which mostly looked like sitting on the ground between tasks, rising cautiously, and accepting that partially numb hands and a screwdriver don’t cooperate. I was not the helpful version I used to be, but I was present and happy to be part of expanding our farm. On days like that, presence and gratitude are everything.

That night, I was tired in a way that felt earned and inevitable.

The next morning, my heart had its say. Rapid and relentless from the moment I opened my eyes, a clear and familiar message that yesterday’s activity had its cost. This is life balance when your body sets the pace. I dragged myself outside to check on the chickens and feed the horses, and then the couch claimed the rest of my day. My toddler has learned what rest days mean by now, and he doesn’t love them. He wants to run and play, but instead, we built puzzles and drew pictures, and he got quieter than usual, the way he has adapted to match my energy.

That part never gets easier to sit with. But here’s what I keep coming back to: I would make that trade every single time, without hesitation and without regret.

This is what balance actually looks like. Not equal parts, not a perfect equilibrium between effort and ease, but a conscious and honest exchange. A full day followed by a still one. Joy purchased with rest as the currency, and that toll was paid happily.

We live in a world that has sold us a very different story. Curated feeds and carefully constructed highlight reels suggest that the right mindset, the right habits, and the right amount of hustle will get you everything you desire. Having it all isn’t just a dream these days, it seems to be expected by all.

I want to gently but clearly push back on that.

That story isn’t just unrealistic, it’s damaging. It turns ordinary limitations into personal or life failures. It convinces people that struggle means they’re doing something wrong, rather than simply being human. It creates a generation so focused on building the life they believe they deserve that they’re missing out on the one they actually have.

Life is not a highlight reel. It is not a vision board that materializes with enough determination or manifestation. It is something far more textured, more humbling, and more honest. It is made of trade-offs, compromises, exchanges, choosing what matters most on a given day and accepting the consequences of that choice. It’s showing up imperfectly, in the body and the circumstances you actually have, rather than the ones you pretend to have, or think you deserve.

Don’t get me wrong: hard work and determination matter, but neither guarantees a perfect life. Believing otherwise doesn’t prepare you for life; it blindsides you when reality arrives. I’ve questioned my own thoughts, wondering if they stem from skepticism or simply maturity; I’d argue the latter without resentment. Younger me was certainly a wild dreamer, but the more mature and grounded version of me, absent of rose coloured glasses, feels far more stable and far more real than anything I had dreamed up in the past.

I didn’t choose worsening symptoms or a long illness journey without a clear horizon. But I have chosen how to meet what is in front of me. In that choosing, I have found clarity I’m not sure I would have reached any other way. I’ve made peace with this illness being part of my path. The lessons it has brought me were ones I needed, and that’s the point. That’s why we’re all here living these lives, to learn what we couldn’t have learned any other way.

Some lessons are grand, and some show up in the smallest places. The drive with my family, my youngest losing his mind over a tank full of trout, and coming home to land and animals we are slowly building into our legacy. None of those moments required perfection. They required presence.

The most meaningful moments of my life have not come from having it all or experiencing it all. They have come from being fully invested in what I have, even when what I have looks different from what I imagined, even when it costs me the following day, even when it means puzzles on the couch instead of running through the fields.

A full life is still possible. It just looks different from what I planned, and different doesn’t mean less. I’d argue that it has led me to more. Life is full in the present.

We are all going to die. The question is whether we will choose to live. Not in the life we once had, not in the life we’re waiting for, or the life we’ve made up, but fully and presently in the one we are living right now.

Presence, shared in stillness