No perfect balance

in #work2 years ago

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After many attempts at trying to find the right balance, the right conditions, the right way to live that would allow me to be productive, happy and at peace, I finally arrived at a conclusion: it is not possible to have this in your life for long enough.

To arrive at such a balance would mean that life would have to be a constant, unchanging thing that would repeat itself over and over again, with nothing new going on. Aside from that you would also have to be pretty much the same thing. Unless you and life align in such a way as to have everything repeating innumerable times, then such a perfect and constant balance can never be achieved.

Just like happiness, such balance will come now and again, be present in your life for a bit, until the smallest thing will change, and everything becomes chaotic again, more or less. And regardless of how much you dislike it, you must once again begin to search for the balance that you just lost.

This is exhausting, frustrating, demotivating and even depressing at times. Just when you think you have things figured out, all of a sudden something small happens and you once again have to struggle. You're back where you came from, trying to set up a routine, to find the right motivation to work, to find inspiration and so on. And on top of all that, you also have to add the disappointment of losing something you just managed to achieve: balance.

That's why I just decided to give up on achieving it. I decided not to chase it any more, and busy myself with trying to make things just right, to get them to exactly where they need to be for me to function as well as I'd like. Why do this pointless thing that requires time, effort and energy, when I can just learn to be okay with how things around me are?

Don't get me wrong - I don't mean that you should give up on trying to improve your life and to just let things be, regardless of how bad they are. Absolutely not. But getting everything right, in order to get yourself to do something, to move forward, just seems like a much bigger struggle than learning to adapt to whatever situation you're in and work with what you have.

There's always gonna be something out of balance in your life, and that's okay. Work towards improving it. But don't stop everything else because of that one thing that's not the way it's supposed to be. Not everything must be just right in order for you to do what must be done.

At least that's the attitude that I'm trying to adopt right now. There's a whole lot of things in my life right now that aren't the way I'd like them to be. A lot of things are out of balance, both within and without. And that takes quite a toll on my ability to do what I need to and make progress. If I wait until everything changes, until everything's balanced again, then I'll have to wait for too long and put a lot of things on pause just for that.

No more. Balance is great, and is quite necessary to a quite life. But it is not a permanent state that you can achieve and then be in for as long as you want. It's a very volatile state that comes and goes, and the duration of its stay is greatly influenced about changes that are often out of your control.

It might be, therefore, better to learn to adapt and do what we must, regardless of our surroundings, than to try to get every single thing exactly the way we want before actually doing anything at all.