Balance, or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the teeter-totter

I've found myself mulling over that holy grail, balance, quite a bit over the past several months. When we talk about achieving balance, it seems to me we're getting it wrong: we imagine it as a static thing, perfect balance in this moment, with everything stacked up in two equal piles on a level seesaw (or teeter-totter to my fellow New Englanders). We all know this is a rare if not completely unattainable experience, and yet we stress the heck out of ourselves chasing after it. What I'm proposing instead is the more reasonable and natural goal of cumulative balance across life's seasons.

For example, my "seesaw of life" is currently overrun with school-related things (depicted at left as the well-fed man - ironically, because a graduate student stipend does not allow for such decadent pursuits as corpulence). Every other part of my life - hobbies, relationships, non-academic life goals - hangs up in the air along with the tiny, disgruntled man in the blue shirt.

Fast forward a few years and assume that I have managed to fulfill two additional life goals: marriage and children. My needy newborn will usurp the fat man's front-burner position on the seesaw (formerly occupied by my education), while everything else (marriage quality, sleep, sanity) will take a back seat for a season, enjoying the view along with Disgruntled Guy.

I'll swing wildly across other continua, too, over my lifetime. So far in my 28 years of life I've spent a disproportionate amount of time and energy on selfish pursuits. I imagine I'll have that luxury again in my old age. The coming mid-life season calls for expending far more energy on others than self (marriage partner, kids, work clients, aging parents). But again, I see it all balancing out over time.

And so, I think, rather than imagining today's events on a seesaw (which will just freak us out with its pesky perpetual wobble), we should be picturing a coin-sorting machine into which we make deposits every day of our lives. For a while, those pennies and dimes will rack up in the "self" and "education" categories while everything else lies empty. Later on, the family (and laundry) piles will threaten to overtake everything else like a fat man on a teeter-totter. But ultimately, as time passes, we can trust that everything will even out just as it should - yes, even the quarters.

No matter the metaphor, I always find that Matthew 6:25-34 is the answer. We had to memorize it for sixth-grade Sunday School and to this day I keep the little laminated card in my wallet, in front of my money, as a daily reminder to keep my priorities (and anxieties) in order. The excerpt below is from the NKJV:

25 “Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 27 Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature?

28 “So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; 29 and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 30 Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?

31 “Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33 But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you. 34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.