People like to blather on about keeping balance in their life and how hard it is to balance work and family and play… Duh! Of course it is. You ever try to walk a slackline? First of all you don’t have a solid foundation. That damn sling is wobbling all over the place, and it’s just too narrow. Even if you do get ‘up’ as soon as you start to move or shift weight you start to fall so you need to quickly compensate, which ends up more often than not overcompensating, and you end up arse over teakettle in the dirt listening to the inane laughter of your buddies. But the cats that can walk a slack line got it all figured out, and it actually looks like fun.
Life, I think is a little bit like that slackline. Often times we find ourselves trying to walk a narrow path on pretty shaky ground. Then we try to not deviate from that path, but have all of this stuff like work, school, family, play, and just some of the random shit that life presents, tossed at us to juggle while we struggle to ‘balance’. Next thing you know like our hapless slackliner, we are tits up on the ground wondering what happened. Sound familiar? Hey maybe not. Maybe in your life you are like the dude that can do backflips and pistols on the line while eating a bacon sandwich. If that’s the case….
Balancing life and training is hard, and in some sense a bit of a fool’s errand. It’s almost impossible to have everything in balance. Something usually gives. You can probably stop reading now if you want, cause’ I don’t have any solutions for you. However…
It’s a pretty well-known fact that I like a good cup of coffee once in a while. As my friends know, I drink my coffee black; the way that coffee was meant to be consumed. But there are those out there… you know who you are; who like cream in their coffee. My lovely wife in fact is one of those people, and I don’t hold it against her one little bit. So what happens when you pour cream into that delicious cup of French Roast (besides making it decidedly undrinkable)? What happens is that the cream when stirred blends with the coffee to make a homogenous new liquid. It doesn’t become unblended; it is in a state of equilibrium. There isn’t much that you can do to easily upset this stasis either. Those fellas that study thermodynamics and entropy can fill you in on the details if you want. The thing to remember is that the cream is blended with the coffee; not balanced.
Now, armed with this understanding you can maybe find ways to blend rather than balance some of the many activities that comprise your life, and are compromising your sanity. Now this isn’t gonna work for every situation or every combination of things, but it could work in just a few places and any little bit helps in harmonizing our lives with our passions. One very simplistic example: I need to ‘balance’ commuting to work every day with working out. The drive is stressful and certainly not value-added. So with the old adage of killing two birds with one stone I can actually in the spirit of blending, blend my working out and commuting by riding my bike to and from work. This can work out exceptionally well for me for a good part of the year. There is no need to balance anything here, nothing tugging this way or that.
Be like coffee my friends….