The Myth of Balance
FLUID NEWS: Navigating in a sea of change
THE MYTH OF BALANCE
(WARNING: If you are in upper management, go directly to Paragraph 4.)
More and more, I am hired by companies to help address the issue of “Work/Life Balance”. I don’t accept every offer because experience has shown that some in upper management, and their bosses, the shareholders, really don’t care about a life-sustaining workplace. They do care about profits; so, when even the most stress-resistant workaholics begin to crack, folks like me show up to offer various trainings. There is little in the way of committed follow-through after these events. The expectation that you will do more with less, in a global marketplace that is different in the morning than it was when you went to bed, grinds on. Eventually, things get worse and some CEO who tried to serve two masters—the employees and the stockholders–is paid millions to leave because he or she screwed up, and the cycle begins again.
I prefer to work with organizations that are genuinely committed to providing an enjoyable, life-sustaining work environment that keeps retention high and is far more productive and consistently profitable over time. Fortunately, there are more such organizations that you might think.
(End of tirade: now we can move on to the main topic.)
The concept of Work/Life Balance seems a worthy one. On closer inspection, I find that it is based on false assumptions that must be changed in order to gain the real objective.
One: There is the presumption that “work” and “life” are two separate forms of existence. While many people have to work at jobs they consider demeaning in order to support themselves, just as many work at careers which they actually like. However, there is no doubt that something needs to change. After all, when was the last time someone came up to you and said: “Well, I’m ahead of schedule–how about you?” In today’s world, being a little less behind than the competition is about the greatest edge one can hope for.
Perhaps a better description of the concern would be for “Life Balance.” Unfortunately, that leads us to the most defective presumption.
Two: Balance is a myth! True balance would require that we play 40 hours for every 40 hours we work–not to mention the 40 hours with friends and family, or the 40 hours we might want to spend alone! (Let me see: 7 days x 24 hours = 168 hours. So, given the above formula for balance, we are left with 8 hours per week for the physical necessities of sleep, nutrition, elimination, etc.) Perhaps balance is not what we seek.
Twenty years ago, while working for a Japanese company on retreat in Bali, I had the privilege of meeting an elder whom the locals considered a seer.
“She was old when my mother was a child,” my 60-something guide said as we entered a small thicket of palms and grasses where Ni Oka Satriya held court. This woman was reportedly over a hundred years old, but her alert eyes reflected light like luminescent black pearls. As she spoke Old Balinese, our meeting required two interpreters. (It took fifteen minutes just to exchange a few honorary words.)
She sat on a small bench, wrapped in a bright batik sari. She did not look directly at me until she asked her first question, which finally babbled its way through the interpreters as: “What is the purpose of your life?”
It seems that when you are a Centenarian Seer, the time for chitchat is minimal.
I tried to explain that my work was intended to help people achieve balance. So, I drew a line in the sand at her feet, with a fulcrum sign under the center. To further visualize my communication, I held my arms straight out, moving back and forth until I became still, when I repeated, “Balance!” She looked at me, laughed, and said in perfect English, “Oh, you mean dead?”
Giggling at my confusion, she then drew a wavy line beneath my line of balance along with a series of cryptographic symbols. The interpreters told me that there was no word in Old Balinese for “balance,” so the closest they could come to in English translation was “Harmony” (and yes, it deserves a capital H). We went back to using Old Balinese-Indonesian-English because the Seer deemed English to be too limited a language in which to express herself. “Everything in nature that is not moving is dead,” she explained. “Like a corpse. Even stones are living. Over time, rocks change shape, size and appearance in their dance with weather.” For the Seer, Harmony meant learning “how to sing your life’s song,” in tune with the events and people around you.
It would be ten years before I truly understood what that old woman was trying to tell me. But then, I’m stuck with thinking in English.
After my first brain surgery in 1996, which I had been told I would likely not survive, I awoke after a 26-hour operation in a room full of medical machines. Had any of them shown a flat, balanced line, I would have been . . . well, dead.
The music and dancing sine waves of those machines brought back the memory-lessons of the Bali wise woman’s description of Harmony that I had been offered a decade earlier.
Unlike balance, Harmony can be achieved–it is, in fact, the natural state of things. In the always changing composition of our lives, Life Harmony means putting down the baton and finding our place in the orchestra; it means we all must learn to improvise so that work, play, difficulty, success, and silence become interwoven in the shifting rhythms of life.
If my readers are interested, I can offer more examples in future Fluid Newsletters. But now it is time for me to be silent, because, as Albert Einstein once said:
“If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.”