When I was at a six year old in school, the older girls would play this game of telling fortunes to us younger kids at recess. They would make origami fortune tellers out of paper they tore out of their copybooks and magically fold them into a flower like shape and mark each petal with a number. They would magically move the paper flower from underneath opening and closing it in their two hands.

Each of us six year olds would jostle around them with huge anticipation for our turn and I remember still the absolute thrill of excitement bursting inside of me like confetti at the whole empowering idea of this. I was enthralled with us being able simultaneously "choose" and "not choose" in determining fortunes.

The first round of choices on the outside was simple: one, two, three, four.

On the inside were more numbers that would then appear like magic and then disappear again when the girls opened and closed the folds. Each opening and closing revealed and concealed one group of numbers from the other group of numbers.

The older girls added more suspense by opening and closing the folds very fast and then inviting us to shout "stop" and we would then be asked to choose a number. They would do this several times, each time faster and then finally on the last round tell us to chose our final number which they would then unfold to reveal your fortune. It was usually a very childish fortune of course - like "you're a silly billy" to which everyone would howl with laughter. (Every one of the fortunes pretty much said a variation of this).

The magic of the folding and unfolding however was what stuck with me in that as with life balance we were magically opening and closing doors at the same time.

And like origami life balance is also a set of skills and practices that can be learned.