Balance is Overrated!

Balance is a word we hear a lot these days. Many people often
strive to find the proper work-life balance, or to balance their
responsibilities with their interests. But there’s a tenuous,
ephemeral quality to balance that I find unsettling. Balance is nice,
but it’s hard to achieve and even harder to maintain. What if, instead
of striving for balance, we sought to improve our flexibility and our resilience instead?

Let’s face it, the reason so many of us list finding the proper balance as a goal is that we want to do everything,
and we want to do it all well. But is this really possible? What
would the “proper balance” in our lives even look like, anyway? 50% of
our time at work and 50% of our time at home? Real-life simply doesn’t
work that way. We can, in reality, only do one thing at a time. And
the normal fluctuations of life demand that sometime work calls us to
give more than 50% of our time, and sometimes home does the same thing.
The part of seeking balance that makes me uncomfortable is the
knowledge that balance can be taken away from us by forces that we
can’t control.

In my seminars, I have an exercise where I ask the participants to all
practice a yoga position which requires balancing on one leg. They all
do their best, some flailing while others calmly and serenely balance
easily. I look for the person who seems to be balancing the best …
and I walk up to them and push them over. (Gently!) This usually
elicits titters of surprised laughter. “A hurricane just happened,” I
tell them.

Do you see the analogy? We can be the most balanced person in the
world, but sometimes outside forces step up and simply knock you down.
Sometimes its a hurricane. Sometimes it’s an illness. (Sometimes it’s
an obnoxious seminar leader!) Balance is lovely, but balance isn’t
everything.

To continue with my hurricane metaphor: Let’s look at trees. When a
hurricane strikes, which trees survive? The perfectly balanced ones?
Have you seen what happens to trees in hurricanes? They bend over in nearly complete arches. At least, the flexible ones do. And then, they bounce back. At least, the resilient ones do. The balanced ones? They might survive. Or they might get knocked down. Or snapped in two.

So how do we learn to become more flexible and more resilient? I believe the answer lies in self-care. Regularly checking in with our bodies and minds and tending to their needs prevents us from becoming brittle, both physically and mentally. Massage can help. So can counseling. Yoga is a fantastic way to care for both body and mind and learn the lessons of getting back up and continuing on after a challenge.

Life will always have its hurricanes. If one is seeking only balance,
then the hurricanes of life may seem like tremendous disruptions that
have destroyed us. But if we learn to bend with the stress
(flexibility), and then bounce back from the episode (resilience), we
might be more accepting of the fact that imbalance is a part of the regular balance of life.

Leslie Irish Evans, LMP, NBCR, CA is the owner of calm by leslie, a massage and reflexology practice located in Bellevue, WA. She’s also the Health and Happiness Examiner for Seattle’s Examiner.com., a Diva Toolbox Featured Contributor, and the host of Diva Toolbox Radio’s “Peeling Mom Off the Ceiling”. She lives in Sammamish, WA.