Counterbalance Your Life
A balanced life is overrated. In fact, a balanced life isn’t something you should be pursing at all, and here’s why.
What does a balanced life mean to you? For most people it means something like you have time for work/school, hobbies, friends, family, etc. People fantasize about a balanced lifestyle and how it will bring them happiness, fulfillment, and everything will be perfect.
But there’s one big problem with this idea of a balanced life…
Life isn’t static, its dynamic.
Life is always changing, our circumstances are always changing, the outside world is always changing. If we attempt to maintain our “balanced” lifestyle in the midst of all of this chaos, everything will fall apart.
Say you’re in school and you have a pretty good routine set that works for the whole year where you need to spend 2 hours a day working on home work each night. But then finals roll around… If you study the same amount the couple of weeks leading up to finals as the rest of the year you are probably going to do poorly on your finals. So, in order to perform well on your finals you’ll put a disproportionate amount of time into preparing for them, which puts you out of “balance” for a time. But it’s worth it because when finals are over you typically have some time off, so you can spend a disproportionate amount of time doing fun stuff.
The same scenario applies to everything in life. If you get an injury, for some period of time you won’t be as active, so you will spend more time doing other things, throwing you out of “balance” for a period. If you move to a new city or town you may spend more time getting to know people and networking than on say self-development, becomes that becomes the priority.
Because life is always changing the way we address our priorities in life changes. When studying suddenly becomes much more important because of finals, you will sacrifice other things, and you should.
Balance is an illusion
When you look at someone balancing on something really well, it may look like they aren’t moving, it may look like they are in perfect control, but that’s an illusion. In reality, when we are balancing on something, we are constantly making tiny adjustments to keep us upright. If you were to take a snapshot in time of you “balancing” and freeze in that position, you would fall every time. The reason is that as soon as something in the environment changes you will be thrown out of balance, causing you to fall. The world isn’t constant, and neither are we. The wind will blow, we will start to lean slightly to one side, or any other tiny force will cause us to move out of balance and force us to counterbalance if we want to stay standing.
Counterbalance is the Key
Because life is always changing, we always need to be changing our focus. Often times these changes are small, like spending an extra half hour on a project and taking that time away from something more fun. But there will also be times, like vacations, where you get to spend the majority of your time having fun. The goal isn’t day to day balance, or even week to week balance, you want balance over the long term.
So, the moral of the story is, don’t seek balance, balance is a static state and its also an illusion, counterbalance your life. When you have to commit a disproportionate amount of time to one area of life for a period of time, make sure you counterbalance in the other direction whenever you can so that you spend more time in the area you’ve been neglecting.
We all have seasons in life, and during those seasons we have different things that take up most of our time, and that’s a good thing. I know I don’t want to have the same balanced schedule every day, or every week of my life, that sounds super boring. The variance makes life fun.
So stop trying to find balance in your life, counterbalance it, adjust based on what life throws at you and don’t get stuck in your ways. Operate in the chaos. Good luck.