Work/Life and Other Balancing Acts
Source: Blue Bird from Pexels
I hear a lot about “Work/Life Balance,” mostly in the negative: Clients tell me they dream of feeling balanced and whole, they complain about stress and anxiety, and they ask me how to attain and maintain balance. I do my best to help them identify what balance means to them, because balance is quite personal, depending on one’s own temperament and style. It’s also harder at some stages of life, as any new graduate or new parent knows, but most of us know when we’re unbalanced, even if we can’t quite remember the last time we had a sense of balance.
My favorite metaphor for balance is riding a bicycle. It’s really hard to balance a bike when it’s stationary, yet enjoyable and comfortable to balance when you’re in motion, heading somewhere, whether at a moderate speed or racing full out. Anyone who can ride a bike knows this feeling of active balance, balance which contains an infinite number of wobbly moments, each corrected almost immediately.
I’d often heard that you never forget how to ride a bike. I got a chance to experience that capacity for myself in May of 2019. I had not been on a bike for at least 30 years, but I was on vacation, I had a chance to ride, and I thought, “Why not give it a try?” I was very wobbly at first, and I had a little trouble remembering how to brake and stop, but I quickly began to get the hang of it again. Each time I wobbled, I rediscovered something about how to correct my course and how to direct my attention forward (while watching the path for bumps). I definitely had a sense of, “Oh yes, I do know how to do this,” even as I laughed at how silly I must look to others.
Balancing through the wobbles of work is harder. For one thing, work wobbles involve a lot more human variables than riding a bike. In addition, the mechanisms of the workplace today are very different from those of thirty (or ten) years ago in ways that the changes in bicycle technology are not. Balancing one's work life is more like biking in city traffic than it is a relaxed ride on a good bike path. Creating your own description of “Work/Life Balance” is a good way to develop the skill of correcting wobbles almost immediately, almost intuitively, via a kind of “muscle memory” based on what matters to you.
For example, if you are at a point in your life where you are working and simultaneously pursuing additional education, your definition of balance may place a high priority on blocking out time for classes and study without interruption from work tasks and messages. If you have young children, balance may mean family time at dinner, then bedtime with the children, and then going back to email and other work later in the evening for an hour. Making time to nurture relationships is key to maintaining balance, for introverts as well as extroverts, so it’s essential to include that in your planning, whether that means a regular walk with one or two friends, shared study sessions with other students, a high-energy evening of dancing, or a long phone call with a parent, sibling, or adult child.
Physical activity is another must, which can mean an early morning workout followed by full concentration on work projects or a mid-afternoon walk before jumping onto yet another Zoom call. For me, regular dog walks and conscious dance sessions are key to maintaining my physical and mental health. That became even more obvious when San Francisco and then California shut down at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. I felt profoundly unbalanced by the sudden change in my daily routines, and I’m grateful that there were continuities I could build on. We had adopted a rescue dog in September 2019, and his initial over-excitement led me to shift from a post-breakfast dog walk to putting on sweats as soon as I woke up and taking our walk before coming home for breakfast. The new lack of traffic and the fact that I didn’t have to allow for driving time led me to extend the walks longer than ever before. I’ve found my days always feel smoother now that they start with at least an hour of climbing San Francisco’s hills and looking out at the Bay (or the fog). Similarly, as dance classes went online, I got to dance with teachers far away, expanding my virtual world even as my physical world shrank. I miss some of those teachers now that they are teaching in person again, but I also have greater trust in my capacity to balance out negative changes with positive ones, whatever the future may bring.
When my clients complain about stress, fatigue, or boredom, when they tell me they just feel stuck, I help them remember what it felt like when work was engaging and energizing, when they were often excited by the challenges they encountered. We re-activate their “muscle memory” about what good work/life balance feels like and describe their up-to-date definition of balance. Remembering the experience of being on a smooth ride to a desired destination makes it much easier to navigate the inevitable wobbly moments while recreating work/life balance.