Balancing Act
...or How I'm Spending the Rest of My Life
I’ve been thinking a lot about balance lately. Things can hang in the balance, like our democracy. People can be mentally balanced, or unbalanced to the point of being unhinged. And some people strive all their lives just to balance the scales of their achievements, or their fate, or their emotional returns.
Recently I’ve been trying to achieve better balance in my own life. When I left my last position, it was with the intention to devote my time to three main things. Writing, my family, and renovating our home/woodworking. (Yes, the last two go hand-in-hand for me.) Unfortunately, with the world in a mess and recovery nebulous at best, it took a while to pack up all the loose ends and reach a place where I was actually able to begin achieving a life/work/love balance. I think, I believe, I hope, I have done so.
But if I thought—even for a second—that life would slow down and allow me to effortlessly maintain that balance…..yeah, well, I had another think coming.
The above was an opening to a post I began before the US election day. But, irony strikes again. Let me repeat that last paragraph.
But if I thought—even for a second—that life would slow down and allow me to effortlessly maintain that balance…..yeah, well, I had another think coming.
Here we all are, trying to make sense of what happened in this country. We can’t figure out how we got here. Some of us can’t figure out how we’re going to move forward, or what that will look like.
And this is where the revised post meets up with my original. All change requires effort on the part of the individual. We can’t make change happen until we examine ourselves and the situation and figure out how to implement it. It begins with figuring out ourselves and what works to motivate us and keep us on track.
Whether change is needed to arrange our personal lives or life in the world surrounding us, it begins with…ourselves. This opens, like most things, with a series of questions (pardon me while I put on my mom-style personal trainer’s hat)
What do we want? How do we prefer to see our life happening?—You can’t reach a goal or make something happen unless you envision it first. What do you think your day should look like?
How do we achieve that?
Well, what looks like a 2nd simple, end-all question, never turns out to be.
What we usually see when we start to answer this is
‘Do A’
‘Well, I can’t do A, until I figure out B’
‘And I can’t do B until C is there, and I don’t know how that’s going to work’
‘If I can’t find C, then I can’t do B, but maybe I can make it work with D- wait, no, I can’t. .….. I give up’
And you do.
So, how do we get past even that 2nd question? Since, in essence, it is a non-starter?
You examine the answer to your first question more closely. What is there in that vision you created that is the most possible? What one thing can you make happen that brings your life closer to what you want it to be?
Since our more specific goal here is to find out where our story is, let’s assume you want to write—for whatever reason. How do you make that happen in a world that has so much demand on your time and energy and responsibility?
Look at the problem as—one of my favorite commercial lines—the fabric of your life. It’s a blanket, or a shawl, or even frayed cut-offs. Find the one tiny thread that contributes to your out-of-balance life that is small enough for you to control.
Most often that turns out to be—surprise!—Time. Seriously, the thing that we swear we can’t control and clearly don’t have enough of is the one thing we can actually do something about.
Look. I’m a mom with more kids than most people like to talk about. I’ve worked at home and outside the home; I’ve been the one who takes up the slack while still trying to remain flexible enough to take up more—I’m that person in our family. And I have interests that I try to pursue to feed my soul and to contribute to society. While I acknowledge that now I am streamlining and I’m trying to off-load some responsibilities (time will do that to you), I still have more to do than I can fit in. But I’m not giving up writing.
So, the first thing you do is make that decision. Prioritize your writing. And take that tiny thread and pull on it. Instead of writing during the infamous ‘Whenever I get a Chance’ time schedule, take 10 minutes a day to sit and write. During a lunch break, during your commute (put down your phone app or whatever the distraction-of-the-moment is), just before or after sleep, or—my personal favorite: whenever you’re waiting for someone else.
You don’t have to ignore people who are important to you; you’re not going to steal time from them. If anything, you’re going to steal time from yourself.
I know you will think that you can’t write anything in just 10 minutes. Au contraire, you can. Notes, ideas, lists, scenes, dialogue, choice lines. Any of those can be started and even finished in 10 minutes. If 10 minutes is all you’ve got, then that is what you use.
Like most tiny threads at which we pull, pulling out the Time thread will soon unravel what was there and create a hole—in this case the ‘hole’ is more time to write in. Busy people know that projects expand to take up their necessary space. That ‘Time-hole’ will expand and persist until it claims the space you need to write. Its importance will increase its priority value, and the other parts of your life will give over to it under the duress of its weight. Seriously, that is what will happen.
You still won’t have enough time for everything. And concentration of effort will shift, and even come and go. But figure out how important writing is in your overall life-scheme, and you will dedicate the necessary portion of time it requires.
Basically, we tend to truly give our time to what is important to us. We get off-track with that when we stop thinking about our priorities.
Scientists know this.
Athletes and performers and artists know this.
Parents know this.
Even CEOs know this, although for some reason it’s not so obvious.
Success at anything takes dedication of time and effort. If you lose your eye on the ball or the prize or even what you think you want, you lose the focus on your own priorities.
Review them.
Reclaim them. Find the thread—and pull on it with all your might. You and your dreams are worth it.
You’ll find out where your story is.
A short message to all my readers. In my own striving for balance, I will be adding more ‘about writing’ posts and original stories. There may be one of those stories coming soon. So, please, keep stopping by. Thank you for your support.
Fantastic advice after this strange post election time. Thank you, Robin.