When I was in high school, my youth pastor drew a diagram. It was a bulls eye. Relationships are arranged like the target symbol.
The center of the target, the bulls eye, is where you are. It's a tight spot, not a lot of room for many others. The next ring would be your close friends and family. It's still a smaller space, but it can fit a few more people. These are the few who you trust with your most precious cargo and your most morbid confessions. The next ring are your fun friends, the ones who are great to be around, you spend time with them, but you wouldn't necessarily ask them to help you with something too personal, or share too much with them, but it's a larger number of people. These rings go all the way out to acquaintances. His point was, not everyone you know can be on the same level of friendship. There is just not enough room or time to make that work, and it's okay to have the few who you trust more than others. In fact, it is wise. You would not want some of those acquaintances on the outside ring sitting by your side during nerve wracking doctor's appointments or other such sensitive moments.
Balance.
This simile obviously made sense to me, as it still crosses my mind over 10 years after the illustration.
It was perhaps the first time that I considered balance in life without connecting that balance to equal shares. It was probably the crack in the icy shell that had shielded me from the revelation of balance of time within life.
A few years later, this concept grew again for me. I was spending all of my time studying, attending labs and classes, taking field trips, and studying for tests. I was driving myself insane. I was isolating myself, and sinking into depression because of it. Finally, on a whim of a breaking point, I looked at my textbooks one Sunday morning and said, "I'm done." For the rest of my undergrad career, I did not do school stress on Sundays. Balance. I realized, as long as I allowed it to happen, all of my days would be consumed by stress and fret. Deciding on one day that was off limits meant that I had to make better use of the time that was not off limits, work harder on Saturdays, and in between classes on weekdays. It meant no longer having to face "study guilt" on Sundays when I failed to get around to studying, because I no longer had any intention of studying. It meant peace. Reviewing priorities. Liking myself. Enjoying life. It meant balance.
Through the years I have worked in different areas. As an adult out of school, work is addicting. It is a place with structure and ritual, much like school once was. It can eat a person alive. It tried to eat me alive. In each new environment, I again had to relearn to set boundaries that created balance. It's okay to take overtime, but there has to be a limit. There is no shame in saying no when that early morning phone call comes. Balance. It means deciding to make better lunch decisions a few times a week so as to not be physically torn down. It means learning which conversations to take part in and which ones to fall silent in, to prevent from being emotionally torn down. It means remembering that there are relationships in my life that are more important than the ones I try to establish with my colleagues, and that just because I am socially worn out from working with people all day does not mean that my need for meaningful social time with the real relationships in my life has been met. It means actively insuring that I don't get so distracted and filled up by work fluff, that I forget to lay the foundations of life. Making sure I don't attend the company Christmas party and then forget to actually celebrate Christmas with those I love. It means instigating balance, sometimes by force.
And now, stepping into a career, I find a new level of balance must be learned. In a job, I can clock out and go home, leave the issues next to the clock and pick them up on my way back in. In a career, I have a harder time finding the border between home and work. In a job, if you get fired, you move on to the next job and learn a new skill set. In a career, you have laid down so much official training, that to moving to another career would require pausing for more education before being able to apply to be a rookie in another field. When I worked jobs, there was never any point in time that I found cause to stay behind unpaid and work a little longer. In a career, it comes down to my reputation, which has often mean staying 3-5 hours late on a regular basis to make sure everything runs smoothly every day. Combine that with having been in school last year, and I can easily admit: there was no balance last year, only survival.
So here I am, learning a new level of balance. It makes sense to me. In school, with every grade, in gymnastics, with every level, in karate, with every belt, in band, with every music piece mastered, there was always another challenge to overtake, another improvement to make. It is the same thing with learning to apply balance to life, there is always a new level to learn. Whether it is balance within family, school, friendships, activities, finances, jobs, careers, every new situation requires new balancing skills.
This year, I am actively focusing on some areas to improve my balance. I want to read books for fun again. Leave work before the sun sets more often. Go for walks and bike rides. Spend time with people who will still care about me in a couple of years. Write more often. Take naps with my cat. Take better care of my garden. Travel more. Eat better. Play a lot more games, and crack a lot more jokes around kitchen tables. I want to intentionally invest in the parts of my life that matter most to me.
This year, I want to balance better.
The time change is today. You have an extra hour. How's your balance?
