Not Everything Has to Be in Balance

There exists an image of an adult who has everything beautifully in balance.

Work.

Family.

Exercise.

Friends.

Healthy food.

Eight hours of sleep.

A clean home.

Self-education.

And who probably spends every Sunday meal-prepping the whole week into perfectly labeled glass containers.

I don't know who that person is.

But it's not me.

And the older I get, the more I think I'm glad about that.

Let's make it an experiment

When my little boy was small, I decided to study computer science remotely.

I was working at the same time.

And I also told myself I didn't want to give up sport entirely.

If I were writing an article about personal productivity, I should now probably explain my precise time-management system, my morning routine and the app where every minute is color-coded.

Nothing of the sort happened.

I treated it as an experiment.

I'll try it.

If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out.

The only thing I felt had to work out was, as far as possible, a nice childhood for my son.

Everything else could rearrange itself somehow.

And lo and behold, it mostly did.

Maybe balance isn't a state at all

When you add a big new activity to your life, the first weeks often look like opening a closet someone has spent five years just throwing things into.

Suddenly everything is everywhere.

There were weeks that were mostly about school.

At work I did only the bare essentials, and of course felt guilty about doing so little.

Then there were different weeks.

And some were simply lousy in all disciplines at once.

Over time it started dawning on me that balance maybe doesn't mean giving every part of life exactly the right amount of energy every single day.

Maybe it's more of a motion.

You lean one way for a while.

Then the other.

And you hope that in the longer-term sum, you don't fall over.

That already feels much more realistic to me.

Rest from work? The kid. Rest from the kid? Code.

That whole period was surprisingly often joyful.

I even used to say I was actually resting all the time.

From work, by going off to goof around with my little one.

And from the laundry, shopping, cooking, cleaning and motherly duties, by opening the laptop and starting to solve a completely different kind of problem.

From the outside it might not look like rest.

But the brain is a strange device.

Sometimes it genuinely rests from one kind of work by doing another kind of work.

Of course, only up to the moment it announces that today it won't be doing anything at all.

Days like that exist too.

A big thank-you to the people standing just a little off to the side

It was not a solo performance.

My mom helped me a lot during some periods. She spent time with the little one, and thanks to that I could work or study.

Then came other periods, when she was ill and needed help from me instead.

And it surprised me that even then, it somehow worked.

Differently.

More slowly.

On a smaller scale.

But it worked.

This feels important to me to keep repeating in all the stories about "what somebody managed to pull off".

Behind a person who's managing something, there's often someone who cooked lunch, watched the child, answered the phone, lent a car, or just said, at the right moment:

"Go. I've got this."

Independence is nice.

But none of us is an entirely independent project.

And then there are things you can't plan

During that time, my relationship situation was changing too.

My little boy's dad carried — like each of us — his own experiences, sore spots and things a person often only starts to see properly when life presses on a sensitive place.

And some of them projected heavily into our life together.

There were periods that were truly hard.

At one point I had to face the possibility that the practical and financial responsibility for our everyday life would be on me.

It wasn't a plan.

But it was a state of affairs.

And it turned out there's quite a big difference between those two sentences.

I used to have a tendency to analyze everything at length.

What could I have done differently?

How could I have communicated better?

What else to fix?

How else to help?

I'm gradually learning that sometimes it's kinder — including to yourself — to accept reality as it currently is.

Not as a verdict forever.

Just as a starting point for today.

Today our relationship has a different shape than before.

At the same time, I'm very glad that after all of it we can have a good relationship again — as parents of our little boy, as friends, and as two people who went through a truly important piece of life together.

I don't know what exactly things will look like in a month or in half a year, work-wise, personally, in any way... I know I'd like to be able to see everyday life as something pleasant, and life and the world as a place worth constant exploration. Beyond that, I can't see... Life has taught me enough times that it ends up sorting this out its own way anyway.

Sport, and maybe the most important thing it taught me

Movement helped me enormously.

I didn't always feel like it.

Actually, quite often I didn't feel like it.

But almost every time I dragged myself out, after a while came that familiar moment:

"Why did I have to talk myself into this so hard again? This is great." That biology, the endorphins and so on — they really work!

And then there were other days.

I headed out.

After ten minutes I realized that today, really no.

I went back home.

Sat down on the couch.

Had something tasty.

And felt a little like cra...

Let's just say I was not at the peak of my personal performance.

I used to treat that as failure.

Today it seems to me that maybe one of the most important skills with habits isn't never breaking them.

It's knowing how to come back to them.

Without a big trial.

Without the dramatic "I've ruined everything again".

You simply didn't exercise for ten days.

Fine.

So maybe you'll go today.

Or tomorrow.

This rule seems applicable to almost everything.

Studying.

Exercise.

Food.

Sleep.

Work.

Maybe even some relationships.

Two paintings and two little monsters

It also helped me to occasionally do something completely impractical.

Over several years I managed to paint about two paintings, make a few greeting cards and crochet two little monsters.

So in terms of artistic productivity, the world's cultural scene need not get nervous just yet.

But there was something important in it.

Doing something just because it might be pretty.

Or cute.

Or so clumsy it makes you laugh.

Not everything has to lead to a result we can put on a CV.

Not everything needs a metric.

Not everything needs monetization.

Sometimes a perfectly legitimate outcome of hours of your life is a crocheted little monster.

A little monster is a sufficient business case in itself.

Maybe the most important unit isn't the day

I think one of the things that whole period of school, work and motherhood gave me is a different view of time.

We tend to grade ourselves by days.

Today I got too little done.

Today I didn't exercise.

Today I didn't study.

Today I wasn't patient enough.

Today I answered only half of the things.

But one day is a terribly small sample.

Sometimes you have an excellent week.

Then comes a week that is, performance-wise, a complete "meh".

But maybe it's exactly the one that gets you through the next two months.

A human life can't be held in some perfectly narrow tolerance in every area.

We are not a production line.

And even production lines have downtime.

I say "where there's a will, there's a way" more carefully now

I used to like:

Where there's a will, there's a way.

Today I'd rather say:

Often more is possible than we think. But not always everything, and not always right now.

A person can want ever so much and still not have the health, the money, the help, the safety or the conditions.

I don't want to explain to someone who's barely keeping their head above water that they didn't want it enough.

But at the same time, I've experienced several times that something that looked unmanageable could, in the end, be managed.

Just not in the way I had originally imagined.

More slowly.

Imperfectly.

With help.

With a break.

With a few bad weeks in the middle.

And sometimes it's exactly this "imperfectly" that is far more sustainable than trying to do everything right.

Superheroes aren't...

I don't much believe in superhero stories.

I suspect all the "unstoppable" people also have days when they look for their phone while holding it, don't answer a message for three days, and eat something highly debatable over the kitchen counter for dinner.

I certainly do.

And that's why it seems much more useful to me today not to know how to be unstoppable.

But to know how to get moving again after stopping.

You don't have to win every day.

Sometimes it's enough not to promote one day into a verdict on your whole life.

Have something tasty.

Get some sleep.

And tomorrow, another little bit.