The Answer of Water

We always hear the terms “work-life balance” and “quality time”… Is there such a thing as balancing work, as if it wasn’t part of our life? Is the time we spend doing ‘one thing’ somehow less valuable than other times spent doing ’something else’ ?

Like many of you probably do, I attempt to attain a balance in life. However, this is my focus – my drive.

Have you ever attempted to hold water? It slips through your fingers and around your hands, defying your attempts to restrain and constrict it. Much like water, I seek to wrap myself around the rocks and ground, seeking the base of it, deconstructing the very way in which I encounter the world.

Water has always held meaning in my life; I somehow identify with this element of nature. Be it in the form of a soft rain, a booming river rapid, or a trickling pool of water… it always finds its way to its basest form; swallowed by the oceans or scooped up by the sky, only to be released upon the world in some shape or form once again.

This is the way of water, the circle of its life. It finds a state of balance by its very nature.

Mike St. Pierre, spoke on work-life balance at his blog the Daily Saint. He goes on to say:

… what is work-life balance?  Simply put, work-life balance is the art of maintaining the integrity of both your labor and your love.  Someone once said that a job is what you’re paid for and a vocation is what you’re made for.

Certainly, those that have families can empathize with this saying. Quite interestingly, family and work should ideally contain components of each: both labor and love. In fact, all things worth having in my life, to date, have consisted of labor and reward, subsequently increasing the value of what was attained.

Mike goes on to quote Julie Mortgenstern, a fellow writer of David Allen at BusinessWeek:

Work-life balance is not about the amount of time you spend working vs. not-working. It’s more about how you spend your time working and relaxing, recognizing that what you do in one fuels your energy for the other.

This simple concept seems to elude so many, and truthfully escapes me at points as well. When I am stressed and focussed on achieving a singular goal, when I loose focus on the broader context of life by which I should be framing that singular goal, balance slips through my fingers like that water I try so very hard to be…

However, when I am calm, when my mind is like water, when I have found my balance… then, and only then, am I prepared to tackle the objective at hand.

Life does not consist of two sides to an equation: work and life. No, life has many more facets and cannot be so narrowly defined or constrained… It is like that water I so strive to be like, always flexing, always changing, always seeking the answer to that question of balance.