Wellness Wednesdays with Diana: Your Weekly Dose of Happiness, Nutrition and Fitness Tips
One Heart, Many Baskets
If I were to think back to the oldest idiom my parents taught me as a child, it would have to be: “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” I went through childhood thinking it was merely referring to the best strategy in which I can transport food from my mom’s house to my grandma’s house, but today it’s starting to have a little more meaning.
This week’s Wellness Wednesday exercise is a variation of this expression. For a change, maybe we shouldn’t put our hearts in one basket. When you’re scrambling to submit that final paper on Friday at 4:59PM, you might get carried away with thoughts of chain reactions. If I don’t get an A on this paper, I won’t get this particular GPA, then I won’t get this certain job, and then my life will fall apart.
Chances are, your life won’t fall apart. As much as we’d like to think we have perfect control of our own fate, it may be useful to remember that life can be pretty damn arbitrary. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m cramming for an Evolutionary Psychology final, but maybe concepts of Big Bang and Randomness go beyond the start of the universe. Maybe this randomness is more prevalent than we think. Of course, we should strive to achieve every goal we have, but it might be a good idea to know there’s only so much we can do sometimes.
I often write about passion, but what I forget to mention is the danger of its excess. Sure, loving something so much can give you meaning and fulfillment, but if you let one sport, one class, one relationship, one area of your life define you, you rob yourself of the ability to get back up in the occasion that you fail in this particular area. It’s easy to think our wellbeing depends on one area of our lives, but it’s certainly not healthy.
The second you tie every bit of your wellness to one specific aspect—or you place your heart in one basket, if you may—then you’re giving away a great deal of control over your wellbeing to someone or something outside of yourself. We are who we are because of a random set of experiences and people we’ve crossed paths with.
Your children may move out eventually, relationships can crumble, and you may not ace that exam after all (but you probably will, I know it): I doubt things will always go your way, but it’s a lot easier to recover when you know that your successes and disappointments are only a part of your life not its soul definition. We should all have passions and loves and dreams, but a little bit of detachment never hurt anyone.
You are more than the sum of your parts.
Diana Gonimah is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania from Cairo, Egypt. She is a writer, Features Editor, and Recruiting Chair at the UPenn chapter of Her Campus. She’s passionate about psychology, journalism, creative writing, and helping people in any capacity. Check our website every Wednesday for Diana’s column!