My New Pie Of Life

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote a post about the effect of being part of Generation Y and the various components of my life. I used a pie chart to illustrate the main segments of my life and alluded to some of the changes that I was looking ahead to in the future. At that time I still believed I would wait for more than a year to go to school rather than quit my job in November and start school in January. I can’t believe that I thought I would wait so long AND do it in the evenings and miss out on performing for two years.

In the last 6 months I’ve come to realize how amazing it is to have a balance of things that you love in your life. Quitting my job was one of the best things I ever did and every day I am so thankful for this dream life that I am living. My new pie of life goes something like this:My job no longer consumes half my life and my new work doesn’t usually feel like work because it’s Weight Watchers and I adore it! I am so pleased with the balance between work, school and play. I also have more time to perform, audition and be on stage which makes me really happy!! For the first time since musical theatre school I really feel like I’m thriving in this regard and have time to actually work on my craft (rather than squeeze it in between everything else that I’m doing)

My new pie of life was demonstrated on Friday within a chaotic, but successful day. Normally on Fridays I lead 1 meeting in the morning and then have the rest of the day to myself. This Friday was an exception due to the fact that I had a one-off Friday class and one night only show in the evening. Add to that some pretty amazing people and some yummy food, and it meant that basically everything I love was wrapped up into a single day!!

With everything going on, I went prepared with breakfast, lunch and snacks Quinoa flakes with apple & cinnamon for brekkie, spinach salad with tempeh & balsamic/flax dressing plus a banana, orange, blueberries & carrots with hummus.

I led a great little meeting and then rushed off to school for my second to last class of Advanced Nutritional Research. I was stoked when we got our marks back for the test we had written on Wednesday and when our teacher let us out early – success! It meant that I had more time to get down to Buddies in a Bad Times theatre for the tech rehearsal for Cabaret for a Cause 11. Tech went off without too many problems and it was good to sing through the group numbers with everyone. We were singing some great group songs like “All the Men in my Life Keep Getting Killed by Candarian Demons” from Evil Dead the musical, “Seasons of Love” from Rent, and Lilly Allen’s “Not Fair”. Once everything was good to go we all went for sushi. I shared some edamame and veggie rolls with Lindsay and our musical director.  I loved the little mushroom ones – so good!  With our tummies full of sushi goodness we were ready for a great show.  For my solo I sang a really fun song called My Party Dress. (Seen here performed by the lovely Jenni Barber) It went over really well!! Lindsay and I also performed the super fun duet “What is this Feeling?” from the musical Wicked. Lindsay sang the Elphaba role and her witches’ hat made me laugh so much. She is such a good friend, it was really hard for us to hate one another!! The whole evening was a great success and I had a lot of fun being onstage with an amazing group of talented people AND finally having an opportunity to sing with Linz. I practically fell into bed at the end of the night (especially since I was getting early up to lead 3 meetings in the morning) but it was such a wonderful day that I didn’t really care. It was a great reflection of my new pie of life and I couldn’t be happier that it contained so many of my favourite things.

So far this year I’ve realized that having such a balance of things in my life makes me really happy. It shouldn’t be rocket science, right? Do things that you love. Cut out the stuff you don’t. Live in the moment and pursue things that you feel passionately about. My pie of life kind of rocks and I look forward to continuing to live it on a daily basis.

Have you examined your pie of life lately? What’s there that makes you really happy? What’s missing? What can you do to change that?