Life is good when there’s balance.
With balance, the many aspects of our lives are in harmony with one another. We’re not overstretched because the balance allows enough time to do what needs to be done, including rest and recovery.
In the life of an adult, or in the mood of a country, finding balance can be complex and elusive, but on a simple scale it can be pretty easy. There are two sides and you need to make sure each side weighs the same. The sides communicate with one another. If one side is much heavier it will shoot down while the other will rocket up. They are acknowledging they’re out of balance. They’re making it known which side is heavier and what our options are. We can either put more weight on the light side or remove some from the heavy side or do a bit of both. If we keep making adjustments based on what the scale tells us we will find the balance eventually.
So that’s our starting point, finding balance between two things with a single fixed variable, which in this case is weight. If we can get the weights to equalize then we’ll be in balance. Neither side will be heavier or lighter than the other and the scale will float freely.
Life is more complex than this though. Especially as you get older, you’re typically trying to balance several things at a time, certainly more than two, and sometimes a tremendous number. Let’s say there’s seven in this case.
Think about that for a second. Now the scale has seven sides, which means seven things will need to be in balance, which is much harder to do. All seven sides will still be communicating with one another, but the communication will be messier and more difficult to understand. One of the seven sides will be the heaviest and one will be the lightest, but all the others will be in the middle, heavier than some and lighter than some. If you add more weight to the middle ones they’ll grow closer to the sides that were heavier and further from the sides that were lighter. At a certain point you’ll figure it out, but it’s more complicated.
Even that is much simpler than real life, though. In real life those seven things are continuously transforming. On a scale this would mean that the weight of each of the seven items is always in flux. What weighed 6 pounds an hour ago now weighs 8.5 pounds. This affects the balance of everything else of course.
But real life is still more complicated. Sometimes there’re seven things to balance, sometimes more, sometimes less. In the morning you have seven things to balance and then by mid-day perhaps there are only five things on your plate. But when you get home to your family new responsibilities take hold and you’re now balancing twelve things.
So the weights are in flux and the number of items to balance is in flux. But each item has its own inner balance to maintain too. Weight is important, but so is health, trajectory, momentum, and so much more. If you keep increasing the weight of one thing to balance it with another, the inner balance of that thing might be thrown off. It might relate well with the others but it’s no longer working on its own. Imagine carving out twenty minutes at the end of a long day to play with one of your kids. You’ve found the time and you’re giving it to your daughter, but you’re so exhausted that you end up staring blankly at the toys in front of you. It’s great you played for twenty minutes, but you weren’t really there. There was no real balance.
No surprise we all feel so much stress as we make it through our increasingly busy and complex lives. There’s just so much to balance, and we feel out of sorts when things aren’t aligned the way we want them to be.
And to make things even crazier, the scale itself continues to change. What do I mean by this? I mean that I’m the scale and my values and aspirations continue to shift. The balance that worked for me last year no longer holds today.
This is kind of insane. How can you find balance in the world when literally everything is always changing and nothing stays the same? There is literally no frame of reference that’s unchanging. All is relative, absolutely all of it.
I want pizza now because it looks tasty. In three hours if I haven’t had any I might want pizza because I’m starving and the longer I go without the more this priority will grow until its literally all I’m thinking about. A few hours ago I could focus on other things but now I’m starving and my whole body and human system is out of balance. If someone had handed me a slice when I first saw that beautiful pizza then I’d be in a different place right now, not hungry, focused on the many other things in my life. But that didn’t happen, and the relative importance of that pizza kept growing all afternoon.
It would’ve been a completely different story if I’d devoured four slices right away. I’d no longer be hungry, but instead I’d be stuffed to the gills, in a food coma and at least somewhat disgusted with myself. Eating too much creates an imbalance just like eating too little did.
So how do we make it all work and not drive ourselves crazy on a daily basis as we strive for balance?
The older I get I’m starting to realize that simple is generally better than complex when it comes to living a life that’s in balance and attuned to what’s important to you. If there’re too many things to balance then you spend all your time trying to get it all working together. If on the other hand it’s simpler, just a few items to balance, then you spend less time on the balancing act and more time just living. The balancing act in and of itself is exhausting. It drains much of the energy that you’d otherwise put into something else.
Simplicity is thus key to balance. The simpler the equation, meaning the fewer items you have to balance, the easier it is to find balance. Balancing too many things is hard to sustain and it’s unbelievably tiring.
If you have too many things going on you also might not give yourself the time to attain mastery in any one of them. Mastery helps us attain balance because as you learn the ins and outs of a specific skill, you learn to do it not only very well, but also with the smallest amount of effort possible to have the desired effect. Being good at something allows you to incorporate it into your complex life much more easily than something you’re just beginning.
Establishing clear priorities is also necessary to find balance. There are too many choices in life. You have to focus on certain things at the expense of others. In order to do this well, you need to know what’s most important to you and then you need to spend more time on the important things than the other stuff that’s distracting you and wasting your energy.
Being honest with yourself is central here. Only by being truly honest with yourself can you lean in to what’s most meaningful and find the balance that’s best for you. So many times people (myself included) prioritize work over other things, but when I do this I’m not being super honest with myself because those “other things” are far more important. Family for sure, friends too, but also having a relatively relaxed mind. If I’m not telling myself the truth about what I really want and need in life, I’ll keep making bad choices like prioritizing work over family more often than I should.
But I like to think I’m trying my best. We all are. We simplify, prioritize and strive to be completely honest with ourselves. We keep balancing the scale on a daily basis, and hopefully we also keep making choices to focus on fewer things but with more devotion to each. Ideally we will also achieve some mastery over those things as well, which in turn allows us to better balance them with others.
So yes, I want balance. But right now more than anything I’m trying to just listen to what my heart is telling me about what matters. My life can be too complicated these days with young kids and work and coaching soccer. I get really tired at times and don’t have enough energy and enthusiasm for what I know is truly important. I’ve been able to make it work, though, finding enough balance to make it through my days as I manage an extremely complicated equation. But now it’s time to simplify and prioritize!
In larger systems, finding balance is the same idea, but there are more variables, more complexity. In governments and economies, balance is what we strive for, because balance implies that the larger system is working as it should, that powerful forces on all sides are respected, that resources are shared fairly.
But this is so hard to achieve. A single relationship between two people can be extremely difficult to balance. In political and economic systems you increase the number of people, which multiplies the number of relationships. Any shift to bring more harmony with one specific individual or group will shift the other elements of the equation. Where is the center? It’s constantly shifting as the world evolves. People are also always trying to shift it through persuasion and manipulation.
In the larger universe there are forces pushing on all sides. Matter is constantly changing forms. Energy flows in all directions. The physics of the universe and its chemistry are alive, never standing still, always interacting and reacting.
There are literally trillions of variables. There’s more than that though. What’s after trillions again? The number is so high it’s better to just use infinity as whatever’s after trillions isn’t even close to being big enough.
But here’s the thing: the universe is always in balance. It needs to be. Nothing is created or destroyed, it all just changes form and keeps doing so, literally all the time. If there’s extreme weather in one corner of the world then that’s what it takes to balance out everything else at that specific moment in time.
Same goes with our lives. When I’m feeling shitty because I’m working too much I’m still in balance. In fact, the shitty feeling is a counterbalance. It’s sending a message that although what I’m doing is not killing me (at least not yet), the only way to find balance in this situation is to feel pretty shitty at times, exhausted, stressed. Working hard demands rest and recovery, so if I’m not getting the relaxation I need then I’ll feel out of sorts, out of balance. And if that’s how I feel day in and day out then it’s time to reset the balance, with more of a focus on feeling good than “succeeding.”
That’s what I want, it’s as clear as day. I want a healthy balance in my life. I also want a healthy balance in my community, in my country, in my world, in my universe, and in the spiritual dimension that holds everything together, but for now I’ll focus on my life and my choices. Love is what’s most important, at least to me, and that’s the force I want to balance my life around from now on.