The False Choice of Balance

This past weekend brought me another joy — a gathering of friends.  This time, the excuse was baseball.  My dear friend Bill S. was there, a rare treat.  We sat for a while and discussed his life — a beautiful young girl, a wife that he’s blissfully infatuated with who carries their second child, a career that has turned skyward and runs.  We chatted about my own experiences in a similar time, now twenty-five years ago.  He talked about balance, and about the difficulty of making room and time for everything — his wife, his family, his daily life and his desire to excel professionally.  I disagreed with the premise, that there was a choice involved at all…

Consider this point:  we’re trained to think of the equation Wife / Family / Business / Success as a circus balancing act as if we are jugglers keeping those four balls suspended in the air at all times.  What if that’s a false choice, and really the key is to line them all up so that they support each other, all contributing to all?  There lies the sweet spot…

When we’re just beginning to get older, we often see love as a finite commodity.  We portion it out among those that we care for and harbour the idea that love for ourselves must compete with that allotment.  Later, we realize that the love that we share, that we give, is the very mechanism for creating more love — and therefore, the greatest boon to self-love is to love others most greatly. 

Hollow and Unsustainable Motivation

So it is in the broader life sense.  As we deeply share our lives with those we love, they, in turn, give strength and meaning to our daily work, expanding our perspective and creating relevancy.  Success and failure become less about our individual selves — a hollow and unsustainable motivation — and instead, incorporates the teaching of our children, the validation of our shared goals, the provision of security and the expansion of a collective world view… all fully worthy results, all sustainable motivations through hard times and loss.  Armed with this sense of primal purpose, we finally have the fortitude to succeed greatly; it is the logic and the reasoning behind the sacrifices that are necessary to excel.

We hear much about the balancing of our lives, our expectations and our aspirations.  True excellence comes from the reverse, the striving not for a moderated result but for a wholly unique one.  Bringing excellence into our life requires that we give everything, always, forcibly denying the very notion that our love, our commitment and our passion are finite commodities… focused on the construction of synergies, and empowered by the simplicity of juggling just one great ball.