Balance is a big deal. It’s also a big problem. I’ve used the word a lot in these posts but haven’t taken it on specifically until now. I’ve also spent a whole lot of time over the past ten years or so trying to understand it, learn from it and apply it whenever possible. Which immediately raises several questions.

Let’s start with why and see where that leads.

My mind immediately goes to athletics where balance is always a key element in how we perform. While the image of a gymnast on a balance beam can quickly come to mind, I was never a gymnast but played enough sports to know that keeping one’s balance and how it was connected to coordination of everything else is not something to be ignored. We work very hard at it, although mostly subconsciously.

We are certainly aware when we lose a sense of balance. Think vertigo. Disorientation. Nausea. Stumbling and falling. The system is pulled this way and that by gravity or other forces and we lose our way. Uncomfortable and even dangerous.

So, balance is a means by which we can navigate through obstacles to get where we need to go. Simple enough.

When it comes to life, things may not reach the stage of vertigo although they may. But, they can certainly lead to the point where we stumble and fall or, at a minimum, are distracted from living the life we feel called to.

So, is a balanced life a good thing and if so, what would it look like and how would that change anything?

Some decades ago, I remember reading and hearing about how modern societies would lead to increased amounts of leisure as we mechanized and placed greater reliance on technologies. In other words, we would be able to decrease the amount of time we spent on labor as we shifted more and more to machines for the things we produced and the services we provided. Futurists (gotta love ‘em) predicted a dramatic reduction in the work weeks and the problems we would have filling all of that vacant time. Uh huh. Kind of like predicting in the late 60s that by 2001, we’d have HAL leading astronauts to Jupiter from a full colony on the moon.

Along the way, something happened. Technology has actually not created more leisure, it’s made us more driven and focused, filling in all the tiny little spaces and demanding more and more energy to keep up, more work to meet the demand.

Yes, the material standard of living has increased for many and there are great promises that that may continue. On the other hand, technology has not contributed an iota to happiness and the offices of counselors and therapists have never been so full in all of history.

I think it’s obvious. Therapy, for those who finally figure out they can’t manage on their own, is simply the process whereby we try to arrive at balance. It’s the process whereby we gain a healthier perspective on what’s really important and are released from the things that tug us in a different direction.

Or, we may think we don’t really need therapy but we do search for ways to gain healthier perspectives by organizing activities so that we’re not just focused on our jobs or parenting, for instance. But, that’s increasingly difficult as our time gets squeezed and many of us feel compelled to fill up those space because, you know, achievement is important.

Well, I’m all for achievement. I’m a teacher after all. But, and I’ve seen this in so many ways I can’t keep track … even upon self-reflection, achievement and balance can be at odds and the battle isn’t a pretty one.

Diane and I talk about this. My men’s group talks about this (and they’re a pretty high achieving group, to be honest) and my friend Gary and I talk about this. This isn’t surprising. None of us are spring chickens and collectively, we’ve lived a lot of life and have seen a lot of stuff. We’ve had plenty of time to succeed and fail and to observe the nature of successes and failures around us. And, with that comes wisdom, not a bad thing to have, although not particularly pleasant in the gaining of it.

In the years I’ve been thinking about all of this, I’ve come to think it’s about determining what a life well-lived is all about. This might seem so intuitive that it’s silly to waste one’s time. Sort of like staring at one’s navel. However, I’d object.

We can have many, many things we want to do or feel we need to do. We can have many, many objectives, some of which we can really even get very passionate about. Raising our children, making our way up the professional ladder, gaining financial independence, having a successful marriage, perfecting a hobby, becoming active in a political cause and so on.

But, we only have this one life and I’m convinced the thing we need to do is figure out how to live it well. That’s the singular objective that precedes all of the other objectives. Absent determining how to meet that one objective, we are pulled off kilter and can easily let other less important objectives dominate us to our own detriment and to the detriment of others who rely upon us.

I was sort of writing about this in my last several pieces and maybe this is the fourth in a series that began with Civil Disobedience and included The Main Thing and The Next Things. Each of those essays was my attempt to sift through all of the stuff demanding our attention … both in this crazy world and in our hearts and minds … so we could have perspective on how best to live our lives.

Balance is all about making room for the multiple things that are key to living the best kind of life. This is anything but easy. I can testify that it takes a heap of work and a whole lot of attention and dialogue with others. We are never our best doctor or therapist.

I have lived part of my life off-balance and part of my life much more in balance and there’s no contest.

So, what are the things I think are most important that we grapple with in something like equal measure?

Relationships. Now it’s easy to just go, yeah, of course. Not so easy to actually understand how this is important and what we need to do to focus heavily in this area. We are naturally relational beings. We are designed for community and for close interaction with others. Most of us wither when we lack strong relationships, especially when they are loving. We become isolated and we either suffer the loss consciously or we suppress the desire and layer on all sorts of other things to make up for the loss. In the former, the heart breaks and in the latter, the heart grows cold. I know both kinds of people.

Some of the hardest relationships to manage are with those closest to us: Our spouses, children, other family and dear friends. The expectations are high and there are often long and involved histories, which are ripe with peaks and valleys. We all know the problems when these relationships are not nurtured and are even broken and lost.

By the way, I don’t count social media as a real plus in this area and neither do those who professionally study it. Social media is a very poor substitute for actually engaging others face to face in a loving way. And, it can easily become an addiction that detracts from our ability to do the somewhat messy thing of actually growing deep and meaningful relationships.

Finally, all relationships need not be deep and meaningful. In fact, some relationships are very brief and spontaneous, even lasting a few seconds. But, I’d argue that it’s in these few seconds or minutes and how we connect with others however briefly, that we are touching deep places that make for a life well-lived. We daily interact with may others and what a blessing to see one another as alive and valued.

A focus on developing and nurturing deep, caring relationships is fundamental to a balanced and well-lived life. Absent the opportunity to go deep, quick but kind and considerate interactions with others is a really good thing.

Work. Here’s the thing about work. We were all designed for work and it’s a necessary thing for us to live. In fact, people who for whatever reason don’t have to work because of being independently wealthy, will often languish and become depressed because there is value in work. We are designed to be creative and productive. These two things create meaning and value and help us to flourish.

But, this is a particularly tough one, especially for those of us in wealthy societies. In very poor societies, people (including children) work because they have to in order to survive. They need to work for sustenance. In wealthy societies we are able to achieve sustenance with relatively little effort (or the state will provide) and so we work for something else. What is that?

Well, I’ll toss out that we work for one or more of three things. The first is material advantage or the accumulation of more stuff that doesn’t contribute to sustenance but to pleasure and comfort, to what we might say is a greater standard of living. By the way, this urge is never completely quenched. More in a moment. The second is status. We want to be recognized and rewarded as successful. I once asked every one of the 100+ teachers at my school to write down if they were above or below average in the job they did. I don’t remember the exact count because this was quite awhile ago but it was something like 90% saw themselves as above average. Aside from being amused by that, it shows how much emphasis we put on recognition and how hard many of us work to obtain it. The third reason we work is because we love what we do. We may love it so much we don’t really spend much energy worrying about the pay or the status. We just love the work, even if it’s hard.

There may be other reasons than these but I’d hazard these are the three big ones and they create some real problems. For starters, people who primarily labor to increase their material standard of living are almost never satisfied. It’s a never ending battle that is sometimes humorously depicted as “He who dies with the most toys, wins.” On the flip side is the saying, “You can’t take it with you,” which can either mean consume every thing you have before you die or material consumption is a hollow value.

And the drive for status also rings hollow at some point. As they say, we start life in diapers and end life in diapers. Not much status in wearing diapers. At what point do we realize that status is transitory and not permanent? We can burn brightly in our “15 minutes of fame” but that flame burns out. On a personal note, as a high profile high school principal, I was accorded considerable status. Most people respected my office and title while the fact that I was also considered pretty successful, in large respect, added to the status. Like other successful professionals in high profile positions (doctors, attorneys, politicians, etc…) we can easily come to identify ourselves with the position, even if we do our jobs with a large dose of humility. Fortunately, in my case, I made a conscious decision a few years before retiring to see myself as completely separate from this position that consumed the majority of my waking consciousness. I am not the position by which others define me but a man independent of that. Status or professional achievement always ends. It’s best when we integrate that into our thinking as a reality before it is forced by circumstance.

For those relative few of us who land in an area of life’s work where we feel drawn and it’s less about making a living or doing a job but about acting out an expression of who we are and the gifts we have, we are most fortunate.

Work is a fact of life and not a bad thing. How we place it into the context of a life well-lived without getting sucked into hollow traps of material wealth and status is a real challenge. We may have great difficulty completely escaping those traps and we may not have the opportunity for long periods of time to do work that doesn’t feel like work but we should try to understand what is happening here. There are all sorts of ways we can inject important values into our jobs to better align them to the main and next things.

Spirit.

While I’m no longer a fan of the term “spirituality” because it doesn’t tell me much, I understand the basic point. Most people think there’s something greater than their basic selves out there or in here. In a sense it’s the super-natural dimension. Most people believe that there’s some part of their being that is intrinsically connected to that dimension although it’s very hard to put your finger on it. Not all people but most people.

As a Christian, I call it soul and it’s the piece of me that is certainly created in God’s image and it’s also the piece of me that’s most important, not that the other pieces are unimportant at all.

I didn’t understand this for the longest time although I spent decades thinking about it and exploring all of the options. Well, maybe that’s not exactly true. I guess I had some understanding of it but couldn’t make it all fit. While it’s still not completely clear to me, I no longer struggle with it.

A balanced life requires that we are in touch with this place, this critically important piece that makes us us and is the direct line to God. And this is hard because it doesn’t typically show up on our time management checklist or daily calendar. But, to neglect attention to this part of us is to negatively impact the other elements of our life, including relationships and work.

There’s a reason God/Jesus taught the Sabbath. We need to pull back from all of the hectic demands for out attention and pay attention to the main thing and the important next things. For these things are the true nourishment, the living water, the bread of life. Without this, we wander and wither.

Different people pay attention in different ways. For me, it’s about quieting the noise which is sometimes very difficult for me to do. I tend to have a hyperactive mind that wants to learn, solve and do a lot. That creates a lot of clutter. On the other hand, I’m a fan of silence and have no problem sitting still for lengthy periods of time without speaking. In fact, it’s during some of these times that I’m actually listening patiently and in some of these times, I end up quite surprised. In a good way.

We Jesus followers also nourish the spirit through time spent in prayer, reading and reflecting on scripture and other texts (often called devotional time), dialoguing about deep stuff with one or more other people with whom we’ve established trust and practice transparency. Some of these things are certainly not unique to Christians and are common in some of the other major religions of the world. They seek to do the same thing.

There are times when it’s important for us to set aside our work and our many relationships and come humbly before God. Jesus modeled this repeatedly and it was central to his example of a life well-lived.

* * *

I just now realized I’ve basically been writing about the heart, head and soul. How we connect with others, how we think about work and how we see ourselves fitting in to the greater scheme of things. And, when we balance heart, head and soul, we are in balance and are leading a life well-led. Or, as a Jesus-follower, living the life for which we were designed in the first place.

In Dallas Willard’s brilliant sequel to his master work, The Divine Conspiracy, entitled Renovation of the Heart, he beautifully lays out what balance really looks like. I haven’t even scratched the surface in this simple essay. I have left much out and have treated the three elements pretty shabbily. However, I hope I have made a point that we should pay a lot of attention to the right kind of balance. For, in that state, we can better focus on True North and better embark on a life well-lived. Amen.