Work-Life Balance

For years I've seen advice articles with titles like "Five Simple Steps to Balancing Work and Family" or "Keeping Perspective with Healthy Work-Life Balance."

Have you noticed that Work is usually listed first in the title, not Life or Family?

I'm not going to be able to give you my version of work-life balance advice. There aren't 'five simple steps,' and it is not a linear process.

How do you know you have the right "balance" between two things? I don't think you can. Biologically, we only have sensations that tell us we are out of balance. We respond to those by moving muscles in the opposite direction. So standing still and walking, for example, are the continuous (and after decades of experience, unconcious) exercises of moving away from the unbalanced state.

I can't honestly say that Jesus lived the 'ideal' of a balanced life. He paid attention to rhythms of work and rest, of prayer, and most of all kept his focus in the right place.

Work is good for us. And we need rest. We need purpose and focus, or we flounder in our flab. So I don't see that work is distinct from life.

Family and friend and neighbor relationships offer suffer from the way we have engineered work today. That's the real out-of-balance issue I struggle against.