When I begin work with new coaching clients, I ask them to set three to five goals for our work together. The word balance almost always appears somewhere in each client’s list of goals: “Live a more balanced life.” “Create more work-life balance.” “Find a better balance between work and play.” “Balance my own needs with those of everyone else in my life.” “How to balance one part of my job with another part of my job.”
The Oxford English Dictionary says that one definition of balance is “a condition in which different elements are equal or in the correct proportions.” That’s the kind of balance my clients are seeking: one in which the different elements of their lives exist in the correct and healthy proportions.
Like my clients, I have always struggled to find balance between all the responsibilities, demands, and distractions competing for my time and energy. Over and over, I strive to organize my days in ways so that there is some equilibrium between my work and for my personal life. And each time I think I’ve found just the right formula, something soon happens to disrupt that stability, forcing me once again to adjust my life and my expectations in search of some elusive sense of balance. I never quite achieve the balance I’m seeking.
Here’s what I’ve learned about finding balance in life: balance is dynamic and in motion. Balance always exists in a kind of tension between competing forces. It’s not an achievement—a one and done. Balance is a cycle.
Think about that classic image of the old-fashioned scale. The heart of a scale is a base and a vertical center post that are fixed. The center post intersects with a horizontal cross bar that moves. On each end of the cross bar, there’s a shallow pan. In one pan, we place an item with a known weight, like one ounce lead weights. In the other pan, we place a substance of unknown weight: flour or gemstones or pieces of candy. We adjust the quantity in the second pan (or the first) until the two pans hang at the same level. When we’ve achieved this kind of balance, we can ascertain the weight of the items in the second pan.
But here’s the thing: we usually see images of the scale as a still image, not moving. But if we see the scale in real life, we know that it’s in constant motion and that adding or removing even a tiny amount of weight from one side—or even a slight draft—will cause the pans to swing from the wires that suspend them. We can balance the weight in the two pans so evenly that they are almost still, but a scale is never completely still. It always dances just a bit.
Balance in life is not a steady state, a perfectly still scale. It is a constantly shifting goal.
The late Irish philosopher Father John O’Donohue said that “Real balance is, in some sense, about action, where the living reality of your life balances what is within you with what you are meeting outside.”[i]
In other words, finding balance is an active and cyclical process. We adjust again and again in our effort to regain equilibrium. Finding balance is a never-ending dance.
One of my yoga teachers frequently tells us, “if our backs are strong and flexible we have balance. If our hips are strong and flexible, we have balance. If our feet are supple, we have balance.” So the dance of balance requires us to cultivate strength—strong and purposeful habits of mind and heart and body—as well as flexibility—the litheness to adjust in response to the changing circumstances of our lives.
What do you need to do to cultivate the strength and flexibility for your balancing dance?
[i] Father John O’Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World-in-wonder (Convergent Books: 2018): 117.
Image by Janine Bolon from Pixabay