'Balance' is the wolf in sheep's clothing

I really hate the word balance. It’s a sneaky deceptive little bugger. Yes, it sounds all positive and inoffensive but its really perfectionism in disguise. It’s the snarky backhanded compliment of words. It looks like a sheep but it’s really a wolf.

Because in life, there is no such thing as true balance.

Photo by Nathan McBride on Unsplash

Maybe if you used the word on your death bed, taking your whole life in view you might be able to say ‘yes, I’m happy with the balance I achieved’ but even this I doubt.

Balance is such a gentle, low pressure word on the surface but it’s hidden evil is in its impossibility. To strive for balance is to strive for the unattainable. To attempt to control what is essentially uncontrollable.

‘But!’ you cry, ‘I don’t want my life to be all of one thing and not enough of another!’

This is true, few of us want to live in the extremes all the time. But there is a different way we can approach this without falling for the elusive charms of that sneak ‘balance’. A different approach which we can use to assess whether we are content with the way we are spending our time.

We can pay attention to the rhythm and seasons of our lives.

I spent the first twenty years of my working life in a seasonal industry as a freelance photographer. My year fell into patterns. Ebbs and flows. It taught me a lot about life’s seasonality and how paying attention to it can alleviate a lot of anxiety around balance.

January was deliciously quiet. The daylight hours are very short and not conducive to editorial interiors shoots. Creative agencies are busy in meetings, pitching their clients with the next seasons campaigns, our agents busily putting together budgets. It was a natural lull in the year for those of us on the creative end.

Then it would be March and I’d be booked solid till late June. Back when I was an assistant to fashion photographers, I’d be away on trips almost that whole time in Morocco or France or New York. When I started shooting myself, I’d be in Cornwall, Sussex, Wales or just west London. I’d not take holidays or see friends that much. I’d come home, do a load of laundry and head off again. Until July when clients would start to take holidays and time off with their kids and everything would slow right down. Till the fury began again in late September.

I was either very busy, or I was not (at all). No week looked quite the same, no month was my income identical and I was really bad at committing to any kind of event in advance. It was the epitomy of imbalance.

But it was so predictable I never panicked. It just was. So I learned to embrace it.

January was when I dove head first into other creative projects. I’d visit art galleries, write, dream, plan. I wrote the proposal for my first book during this season. Wrote short stories in another. And started a podcast in yet another. It was a rich time, free from the constrains of having to be on set by a certain time and shoot until the work was done (whatever time that would be).

My year looks different now. I now write and work with other writers, so that I can be at home, on hand for my disabled teenager. Almost four years in to this new life, I’m still getting a feel for its rhythms. But they’re there. And where they have been missing I have had to create them. Designed them to be in flow with what the writers I work with need and what I need as a working parent.

It looks very unbalanced.

I have periods where I get almost no time alone, and others when I get a lot of it.

I have periods where I am both furiously working on my own writing and also editing three other writers work (which is a lot of books to keep in my head at once!). I have times when I have to be very outward facing and available for work and it clashes with what my son needs from me.

There were times in the past when I had only three hours sleep, up most of the night with a disabled child and then drove across the country for a shoot. And now I sometimes teach classes and meet writing deadlines on the same.

I don’t share any of this to proclaim how tough I am and that ‘if I can do it in unhealthy, unbalanced ways, you can too!’ Yuck. Believe me if I could control how much sleep my disabled kid gets and how disrupted I am by school holidays, paid carers getting ill, meetings with doctors and all the other crap I deal with as a parent carer, then I would.

If I had total control I would create the most beautifully balanced day, week and year you could imagine. I would nail balance.

But this kind of control is an illusion.

I can’t control my son’s needs anymore than I could control when Marks and Spencer’s AD campaign needed to be delivered by (actually I’d be more likely to convince M&S to loose a ton of money missing Ad space deadlines than convince my son to do something he didn’t want to do).

I took what I learned about leaning into the rhythms of my year as a photographer and applied it to the rest of my life.

If looking at your life in a way that goes beyond looking for a balanced day or week is new to you - where do you begin?

I would begin by plotting out the most predictable rhythms of your year. If you have school age children for instance, September will always look very different to July. If you’re freelance there is likely a pattern to when work is quiet (right before new budgets are decided for the following tax year?). Do you get ill every autumn without fail and need to slow down? Do you have endless family birthdays in June?

And what about the temporary seasons that go beyond the yearly calendar? Do you have 1 year left of extortionate (but year round and consistent) care for your pre-schooler before having to mould yourself to the school terms? Finally, after a lot of rest, are coming to manage a chronic illness? Are you currently living in a building site as you create a home for your family? Driving 250 miles a week to support a parent whose health is declining?

If you are furiously busy right now, when can you slow down? If there is no predictable time in the future when it will be quieter, is it time to enforce a slowing down?

If your paid work is hellishly quiet, is there a predictable time when it will pick up? If there isn’t (and you need it to) is it time to take action now? Or next month? Or in the summer?

You might be juggling a lot of things right now, but some of those things are really energising rather than draining? Maybe you can see that something will be coming to an end soon (like the last year of school runs before your tween does it alone - welp!) and it’s worth being extra busy for this last stretch. In that case, forget what it looks like on paper and embrace this bitter sweet phase. Fuck balance.

Life throws us endless challenges and joys. Some of them we choose willingly and others are thrust upon us. Either way, we have to deal with them. And they have a pesky way of interfering with our perfect balance. And the thing is, they never really stop coming. Ever.

Embrace, instead of fight. Accept what is uncontrollable and work with it. Sometimes I have the luxury of time and headspace, at other times I am flying by the seat of my pants.

Is it ideal? No!

Do I have a life that I am proud of, even with its challenges? Yes.

Would I take year round stable care for my son and a full nights sleep if I was offered it? Also yes. Please.

But in the meantime, I’m getting on with my unbalanced life.