An Essay on Balance

Evolving Beyond Work/Life Balance into a Flow that Works for Each of Us

Can you tell that I’m going through a phase right now of introspection, processing, and feeling? I promise we’ll get back to the tech-focused stuff here, but I tend to write these newsletters based on what I can’t stop thinking about. Right now, it’s this.

It all started last week when the head of Duco asked the senior leadership team to rank the most important things for us in the workplace ahead of our retreat. The words included autonomy, impact, compensation, and work/life balance.

Now, I’ve seen this phrase so many times. It’s a question on nearly every company’s pulse survey to understand how their employees feel about being at the company. It’s supposed to be this measure of ensuring you aren’t focusing too much on one thing. Based on whose measurements, I don’t know. Society’s, I suppose.

At Facebook, this was something people always said they had very little of but also didn’t rank high as something they wanted to focus on “fixing.” Again, whatever “fix” means.

When I read this last week, I felt immediately angry. I suddenly had had enough of being made to feel bad every time I saw these words. When I saw these words, I saw a construct created that I was expected to fit in. I felt very caged. I had to get out.

This is a strong reaction to have. I was not expecting it. But ever since the eclipse, I’ve thought a lot about balance and flow. These two concepts are present in almost all tarot, oracle, inspiration, or any tools one might use to get more in touch with one's feelings. One of the decks I use - the Spacious Tarot - has beautiful imagery. And it had given me all sorts of clues about balance and flow for the last few weeks. 

So, I very dramatically put my cursor next to the e in life and one-by-one deleted the letters until just balance was there. I declared to my coworkers in a Google Doc comment that I would no longer think of this just as work/life balance but instead more about rest vs action, thinking vs doing, planning vs executing, learning vs teaching, etc. I then immediately knew I had to write about it. I had to think through this more. (Also, sorry to my co-workers who had to be on the front end of this energy. You also knew what you were getting when you recruited me 😂)

I started by looking up where the phrase comes from. According to the Internets, it’s from the 1980s women’s liberation movement and providing flexible schedules for women who wanted to work and raise a family. Well, that explains my feeling caged in by it. 

A note before I go further: if the construct of work/life balance works for you, that’s amazing - keep using it. But, if it doesn’t, you aren’t alone, and if you want to throw it away, too, please do.

You see, for me, work is very intertwined with my life but I also have a life outside of work, and separating the two is not my goal. As I told my co-workers, I’m instead trying to figure out how I flow between different things. So, I thought I would go through the things I am trying to do and match them up with the card from the Spacious Tarot that illustrates the balance I’m working on.

Rest and Action
Oh, this is a daily struggle for me. I like this card because it has the cup sitting on a plateau, but inside of it are mountains, which, to me, represent action and climbing to the next thing. The water flows between them. I don’t know if it's me getting older or the effects still from the pandemic, but I need more time to recover now after being around people for a long time. But then I feel bad for not being productive. Part of me knows my worth is not tied to my productivity, but it's deep-seated in me. I also know rest helps me be more productive, but this is a big one.

Thinking and Doing
I love this card. I love how the heat of the fire and the coldness of the icicles come together to make steam. I chose this for thinking and doing because it’s only when you bring the two together that something magical happens. While ideas will come to me at all sorts of times, I find that when I sit with them a bit, I get to know them better. I go deeper and can make more connections. That usually comes when I’m not in front of a computer but journaling, driving, or conversing. This also goes with the rest and action one because it’s often when resting that the best ideas come.

Planning and Executing
This is similar to the other ones but also different. I want to call this flow out because I think it is so necessary that from time to time, we zoom out of our daily lives and give ourselves time to plan and think about the big picture. We need to take a pause and make sure we’re on the path we want to be on. I linked to this on Sunday, but I want to call out Emily McDowell’s piece again that encourages us not to look at life like a line up and to the right, but rather circles of expansion. Taking time to plan and execute are important.

Learning and teaching
What draws me to this card is the black-and-white of the stone in the center and the ripples flowing out from it. I’m always trying to learn new things, and that will never stop. But I’m also trying to find ways to continue sharing the things I’ve learned and helping those who want to learn more about the work I do or my experiences. 

Internal and external expectations
This one is a doozy. I had a hard time picking between cards here, as the one before it in the deck also has a fish and a cup, but that one has a view from above, whereas this one is from the side. I picked this one because the other one felt still more impacted by external/from-on-high views, and this one is more of a piece of peace about going after what I want my life to look like.

Tradition and trailblazing
This image has so much going on. You have the old stone structures that represent tradition, but then you have the sun coming up that represents something new. You also have the eclipse happening to the sun, which also signifies change. Up until writing this paragraph, I was taking this to mean I was on a different path than what most other people have. While true, that ship has sailed. I think this now is wholly a question for myself of if I want to stay on the path I’ve been on or if it is time to go off trail again.

Speaking and listening
One of the many things

Lori Brewer Collins

helped me to get better at is the art of listening. I still have work to do, but in my line of work - politics, and tech - there’s a lot of speaking and not much listening. In this image, the sword represents speaking, and the bird above it, to me, is about listening and pulling in the big picture, which only strengthens ones thoughts and ideas when shared with others.

Letting things go and having grit
Don’t quit. Keep going. Push through it. Oh, the number of times I heard those phrases growing up. What wasn’t taught was how to let things go or when to know a chapter had closed. A person learns so much going through hard things, but there also comes a point in time when it is okay to let go of things that no longer serve you. Wisdom is knowing the difference.

I will leave you with the magician card as it symbolizes balance amongst all of these things. I won’t lie; I feel a little more unbalanced after writing all of this than I expected. I sent it to a good friend for feedback before posting, and she asked me what I could write that would leave me feeling more balanced. I answered that I didn’t know but that I was trying to go with the flow and experimenting to find out what energizes me and what doesn’t.

The journey continues…

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