Balance is Overrated

Over and over, almost like a mantra, so many of us are saying “I need to balance my life.” Toward that end we fill our calendars outside of work with quality time with loved ones, and commitments –sometimes against the grain—to meditate or do yoga, to take classes or to volunteer. So many of us find ourselves doing little bits of lots of things and not feeling good about much of what we do.

Do you also have the nagging feeling that you can't quite get this "life balance” thing to balance? Maybe that’s because it doesn’t. I realized this week that “Balance my life” is just another item on the big to-do list in my head, and it’s another thing nagging at me that I should do.

Well, I quit. Balance is overrated.

Think about it. People we admire, those who have made a difference or a contribution or who have a clear vocation lead remarkably unbalanced lives. Consider the greats in any field: Einstein? No balance at all; he was actually quite a weird guy. Thomas Edison? He never left the lab. Ditto for Marie Curie. Venus and Serena Williams? Tiger Woods? For serious athletes their entire family has to live on a tilt-a-whirl.

It’s true for creative types too. Emily Dickinson? Edna St. Vincent Millay? We love their poems, but look at their lives. And statesmen? Saints? You get the idea.

So who cooked up this idea that we have to have to have our fingers in so many pies in order to have a good life? Probably writers whose own lives are notoriously out of balance. But they make it sound so simple and so wise to have a balanced life that we race around weighing and measuring to make sure we have equal parts of work, home, family, social, spiritual and civic in our lives.

The theologian Fredrick Buechner—who had a seriously unbalanced life—defines true vocation as “the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.” Now it doesn’t make sense that deep gladness will come from ticking off a long to-do list or that the world’s deep need is met by doing tiny bits of this and that like rote do-gooders. But the idea of balance so appeals that we run faster and faster to balance our social and emotional portfolios; we take yoga and meditate, try to eat well, call friends, see the latest play, buy if not read the latest bestseller, attend the school play and send emails from the car and leave voice mail at midnight.

How much energy we waste striving to balance our lives. What if we celebrated a tilting life, one in which we gave a primary commitment to kids or a job we love or making art or seeking spirit? We do have to make choices but they are not for all time. I don’t think it’s balance that we really want at all. What we want is to feel good and to have peace, and that mostly comes from feeling well used by life. That doesn’t happen when we are running around doing little bits of many things.

Here’s a radical idea as we move into spring: Give up balance; don’t go to any store, party, or event unless you really want to. Give self-improvement a break. Read what you like even if it’s not “good” books, and choose the couch over the gym, and the woods over the party if that is what your soul craves.

Stop and look into the world’s deep need that’s in your community. Find the source of your deep gladness that runs near by. Allow yourself to lose your balance. And just fall in.

Ebby Thatcher

March 21 1966 Ebby Thatcher died in Ballston Spa, New York. Ebby was the man who Bill Wilson called his sponsor because it was Ebby who came to Bill in his Brooklyn kitchen November 1934 and told how he had stopped drinking.

We know this as a central part of “Bill’s Story” on pages 8 to 14 in The Big Book. On page 11, Bill writes:

“But my friend sat before me, and he made the point-blank declaration that God had done for him what he could not do for himself. His human will had failed.”

Ebby stayed sober for a few years and then drank again. He sobered up with the new program—it had morphed from the Oxford Group to become AA. In and out he went—struggling with jobs and relationships. In the last few years of his life Ebby lived with a community of AA people in Ballston Spa who ensured that he did not drink, so that he would be able to die not drinking.

I celebrate Ebby because it is clear that he was used by God. Not to be an AA star like Bill, but to carry the message and be a cog in the wheel. The consequences for his own life are not the stuff that any of us in sobriety wish for but we owe this deep debt to Ebby T. for getting Bill Wilson sober. And the rest is our history.

March Madness

I talk to a male friend today who asks me, “What do you do to relax?” And I don’t have an easy or obvious answer. He tells me that when he plays golf or fishes or watches basketball he thinks of nothing else. Ditto when he is chopping wood or taking a long walk. I realize that my mind is always going and few things give me real respite from my thoughts.

This becomes a challenge: What do I do and what can I do to truly relax? Not yoga to get in shape or walking to get an aerobic benefit but what activity that is not improving any part of me: mind or body or intellect?

What do you do to relax? Really relax.

Amateur Night

Saint Patrick’s Day, like New Year’s Eve, is often called amateur night. On this night people who don’t have drinking problems—and those who do—tend to drink too much. There are more DWI’s and more fights and more screaming at boyfriends and tomorrow I imagine that there will be more waking up with headaches, scraped knees and yes, with strangers.

Aren’t you glad you don’t drink?

Thomas Merton Prayer

Thomas Merton wrote this prayer:

My Lord God,
I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that, if I do this, you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadows of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.


What I love about this prayer and perhaps what I cling to is the line: “Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.” It reminds me that we sometimes hear in meetings, “What other people think of me is none of my business.” And maybe it’s also true that God’s will for me is none of my business. Maybe in the greater scheme of things (God’s will) I’m one of the “Don’t” examples. Kind of like in the back of Glamour Magazine where they show the “DO” and “Don’t” examples of what to wear. The “Don’t” examples also help us. Maybe God needs a certain number of “Don’t” people and I’m one of them? But like Merton I’ll keep trying to get it right, but others may be thinking, “What the F….?”

Rachel at the Wedding

I saw this 2008 movie last night. Anne Hathaway as recovering addict. The cast is amazing, every actor superb. But looking at what our addiction does to other people and what early recovery’s self-centered fear looks like and does…yikes. And I say this all the while hoping that the self-centered fear of later recovery is somehow a better version. Oh me, Oh my. Humbling.

Gravy

No other word will do.
For that's what it was. Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving andbeing loved by a good woman.
Eleven years ago he was told he had six months to liveat the rate he was going.
And he was going nowhere but down.
So he changed his ways somehow. He quit drinking!
And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minuteof it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and building up inside his head.
"Don't weep for me,"he said to his friends.
"I'm a lucky man.
I've had ten years longer than I or anyone expected.
Pure gravy. And don't forget it."


---Raymond Carver