balancing life and mitt romney

Today I needed to: meet with the carpet cleaners, attend several case task and client meetings, get my dying car battery replaced, go grocery shopping, respond to emails waiting in my inbox, meet Max at the gym, check off on visiting teaching, etc etc etc etc etc...
And I've completed TWO of those things today.
TWO of the many things on my very-important-never-ending-must-get-done-today list.
And now it's 8 PM.
And I'm stressing about all that I haven't done, while not getting anything done.
And I keep thinking to myself how on earth am I going to accomplish everything else going on this week? Or next week? Or, because I'm a girl, the rest of my life? (ha ha ha)

I spent New Years afternoon sitting on the couch with Max writing a list of things I was going to improve this year: Actually cook a meal (not a lean cuisine) for dinner on Tuesday nights. Draft court pleadings on my own (without always asking for help). Stay on top of laundry (not going to go there). New primary presidenct = really get to know the children I am serving (still learning names). Spend a devoted amount of time with friends and family (I still haven't met baby Harper) and yeah. You get the idea.

I know I'm not alone. And I know having goals and being busy isn't always a bad thing. But when I start to beat up on myself for not staying on top of my very-important-never-ending-must-get-done-today list, I think about something Mitt Romney shared a few months ago in a forum at BYU. I (obviously) was there (front and center) -- and during the Q&A session he shared the following advice:

"Balance is something I’m always asked about, about work, family, church, community. I once joked that if you’re not fulfilling all the things you’d like to do in your family, if you’re not getting the job done at work and you’re not fulfilling your church callings like you ought to then things are in balance. But the truth is, for me, family came first. Family, faith and our country, and those are the things that are meaningful to me and you give yourself to those things as you can...

There’s a tendency, sometimes, by the way, for people to think that instead of balancing all these things all the time, that you should do one for some time and another for a different time and another for a different time. Such as, you’re gonna go off to graduate school so you’re gonna put your marriage aside because you want to make it work in graduate school... That, in my opinion, is a big mistake.

Yet if I wasn’t working, I felt there was this cloud hanging over me that I should be working or studying. And I decided I wasn’t going to do [that] any more... A lot of people at the end of the day bring their work home from work in a briefcase, or now, an iPad, and they devote themselves after dinner to continuing work. I made it a practice, unless there was a very unusual circumstance, that when I came home from work and shut the door, I devoted myself entirely to the home and the family. Home was my sanctuary from everything else in the world.

_____

I know it's easier said than done, but I really liked that bit of advice. It reminded me of what Elder Ballard once shared, "What matters the most is what lasts the longest."

And I guess that kind of sums up my thoughts entirely.
Maybe my new-new-years-resolution can be: always remember that.