LEAPING THROUGH LIFE LEAVES NO TIME FOR FUNBy Lisa Earle McLeodwww.forgetperfect.com If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will immediately leap out. But if you put a frog in cool water and gradually turn up the heat, the frog will boil to death without ever trying to escape. The same thing happens to people. If someone had told you 10 years ago that one day your life would include three events in a single evening, 32 rounds of cell phone tag and 57 emails waiting for you when you got home, you would jumped out of that kettle faster than you can say deep-fried frog legs. But just like the amphibian that starts off in lukewarm water, the pace of your life often heats up so gradually you aren’t even aware of the fire. You add one thing, then another, and then another. And while each individual activity may be worthwhile, or even fun, the collective total makes you feel like you’re thrashing around in a hot pot 24/7. And no amount of time management skills will make the water stop boiling. Want a surefire way to turn an enjoyable event into total misery? Try packing it in with three other things on the same day and leaving yourself only 5 minutes to get from one stop to the next. And if you really want to turn the whole day into slow, draining torture, drag a few kids along. I recently worked a two-hour stint in the prize booth at my kids’ elementary school Spring Fling, and I got an up-close glimpse of the price we pay for the "we’re going to get all this stuff done if it kills us" syndrome. For those of you unfamiliar with the fling phenomenon, imagine kids hurling beanbags through the mouth of a big plywood clown, pink glitter butterflies painstakingly painted on snow cone-stained faces, and junk food galore. What really gets flung at a fling is lots money - laid down by weary, well-intended parents in the hopes that their kiddos will have a good time and the school will raise enough money to pay for a new gym floor. As head prize booth monitor, my job was to assist the kids as they traded in their hard-won tokens for cheap plastic prizes. I was the last stop on the Spring Fling parade of fun and after tossing enough rings over a Coke bottle to rack up a handful of tokens, the kids were more than eager to claim their bounty. You’d think after spending hours plunking down wads of cash for the pleasure of watching their kids jump around in the Bouncy House and try to throw Ping-Pong balls into a fishbowl, the parents would be taking a break in the back of the room while their children agonized between the inflatable globe and the 3-D glasses. But no, every single parent there was trying to shuttle his or her kid through as fast as possible so they could move on to something else. Whether it was rushing off to soccer pictures or trying to get home before the icing on the cake walk cake melted, "Hurry up, honey, we’ve got to go" was the refrain of the day. The sad part of this whole scenario was that these parents had gone to a huge amount of work to set this thing up and they’d spent their time and money to take their kids to the event, but they were so worried about moving on to the next thing, nobody was having any fun. Many of us have bought into the notion that proper time management is the key to a happy and balanced life. Better scheduling means more things checked off on the list, and who wouldn’t be happier about that? But the overanxious clock-watching parents at the Spring Fling were proof that if you take a bunch of fun things and cram them all together in one day, they will cease to be fun. I’m all for making the most of what you’ve got, but at a certain point, adding more stuff to your list diminishes the likelihood of enjoying any of it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a career opportunity or T-ball game, when you schedule a zillion things in a row, your mind is so focused on frantically checking things off your list, you never fully engage in any of it. Frogs may have a brain the size of a pea, but they’re smart enough to give themselves some lily pad time in between their rounds of making tadpoles and flicking their tongues out for flies. Next time you’re tempted to throw one more event into the hopper, remember the boiling point can sneak up on you slowly. Throwing more into the pot doesn’t always add to your life - sometimes it just makes you want to croak. Lisa Earle McLeod is a syndicated columnist, a nationally recognized speaker and the author of "Forget PerfectTM: Finding Joy, Meaning, and Satisfaction in the Life You’ve Already Got and the YOU You Already Are." (Penguin/Putnam) She has been featured in Real Simple, Essence, and The New York Times and seen on Good Morning America, Lifetime and FOX. Contact Lisa at www.ForgetPerfect.com if you would like additional columns. Editors: If you’d like to run Forget PerfectTM in your paper contact Lisa@ForgetPerfect.com. Column must include byline and photo. 
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