Balance is something that so many of us strive for in our lives.
Some of the most common aspects of life we try to balance are our work and our play, our time with others and time with ourselves, our spending and our saving, our wants and our needs.
There are many more than just these examples, and they definitely are not mutually exclusive.
A person may feel the need to work a job they don’t like - and potentially many hours at that job - so that they can make money to provide safety and security for their family. Within that one example, they are trying to balance their time, commitments, accountabilities, dreams, passions, and desires, trying to not to “tip the scales” too far in one direction.
What often happens is that when we strive for balance, we end up making compromises so that everything can seem equal, feeling the need to give some things up so that there is room for others.
Looking at the way in which we organize our time, we understand how that may be necessary i.e. you can’t spend all of your time working, all of your time with your family, and all of your time by yourself, so there must be some level of compromise of giving one up for the other.
Although this may be true when viewing time through a quantitative lens, the concepts of balance and equality take on a whole new perspective when we view time through a qualitative lens.
Do we need to have equal amounts of pain and pleasure in our life? How about fear and love, apathy and inspiration, scarcity and abundance, disappointment and fulfillment, anxiety and contentment, or frustration and gratitude?
While experiencing the negatively charged and less desirable feelings and conditions may be extremely powerful - and potentially even necessary - catalysts and perspective makers for us to both generate and appreciate the positively charged and more desirable feelings and conditions, it is absolutely not necessary that we experience them in equal proportion.
When we focus on the quantitative aspects of life, we tend to see things through a lens of scarcity, worried that our time, our money, and our actual life itself will run out, therefore we must do everything in our power to stock up and keep as much of it as possible.
But when we shift our focus to the qualitative aspects of life, we shift to seeing things through a lens of abundance, no longer worried about “losing” our time, money, or life force, instead steeping in the gratitude that we have the opportunity to receive and experience any of it in the first place.
It’s imperative we remember the power we have to shift our fear of death (loss) to the celebration of life (growth), as it opens up the opportunity for us to create balance in our lives without compromising our life itself.
Instead of dreading our work and desiring more play, or lamenting our responsibilities and craving more freedom, what if we equally found gratitude for all the aspects of our lives - the difficult and easy alike, recognizing that it is all of them in their entirety that make up the whole of our human experience?
