Balance has always been an issue for me. I don’t mean physical balance; fortunately, I’ve always been reasonably athletic. It’s balancing the responsibilities with the passions, the “have-to’s” with the “want-to’s”, real life with the whirlwind of commitments and goals I always seem to make. At the beginning of each year, when I reflect on the previous year and set goals for the new one, I grapple with creating a realistic schedule — that is, one that I can actually adhere to for longer than 15 minutes.
Like many people, I have a lot of things I both need and want to do. Obviously, I need to make enough money to pay my bills, which means I sometimes have to compromise my priorities. I enjoy most of the work I do, but I have to put paying jobs before those that might bring me more personal pleasure. Each year, I carefully list or draw or mind-map or chart the various areas of my life. This year, the list includes family and relationships, work (writing, photography, The Writer’s Eye Magazine, and business consulting), health and fitness, spiritual growth, and continuing education. I have generated a number of goals for each area, but the thorniest (for me) is work.
The question is: when you do as many diverse things as I do, how do you manage to keep everything moving forward, stay balanced, and make progress? How do you grow your business, when you have not one, but four businesses? Each area of business has its own set of daily maintenance activities, goals, and requirements, some of which overlap. Overlapping goals are great, because when working towards those, it’s like achieving two things at once. But most of the activities and goals do not overlap, leaving me with a sometimes frantic sense of overwhelm.
Balance often seems to be an unachievable dream — a ball poised, perfectly motionless, on the head of pin, without a breath of wind to
disturb its perfect center. We want to experience life from that kind of constant grace. Yet, the truth about balance is that it’s a transitory state. An accomplished dancer moves from a balanced center, yet she doesn’t stay perfectly balanced all the time. In fact, the beauty of her dance is her ability to continually achieve, then fall from and regain her balance — a poised moment at the height of a leap, before dropping, catching, and moving seamlessly to the next breathless half-second of balance.
The dance of life is like that. We catch a moment in the air when all the forces of our efforts have come together in perfect harmony — balanced, flying, everything working together, our hearts exulting in the beauty of it — when down we come. It is our task to learn how to weave those moments of balance together, one to the next in a smooth transition, that will allow us the impression of a balanced life. If we lack that skill, life can seem to consist of disconnected events and overwhelming responsibilities, with occasional bouts of balance.
This year, once again I’ve created my goals, set a schedule, and hope to be able to stay with it. I also intend to stay mindful of the truth about balance: it is not a state of being, but connected states of being. Perhaps this mindfulness will help me become more skillful in my own dance of life. At the very least, it will help maintain perspective.
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