My children have a wooden toy that is designed to help with concentration and coordination. Held in your hand, the challenge is to use fine adjustments in your grip to line up rotating magnetic disks in a straight tower–not an easy task, since the disks easily swing erratically in different directions. It is possible, but it requires a tremendous amount of focus. And when you finally achieve perfect balance, the celebration is short-lived. The stack sways out of alignment again within seconds.
As I came across this toy the other day while cleaning, I held it in my hand and played with it for a moment. I thought about how this little spinning activity is like my attempts at “balance” in my life. A little this way, a little that way, a little more this way, steady, steady…oops. It’s totally off-kilter again!
A little exercise, a healthy meal, clean the kitchen, sort the mail, sit down to pray…whoops. I’m two hours behind on work and we missed the college admissions deadline!
Drive to basketball practice, homework help, load of laundry…whoops. Sick child. Head to urgent care and forget about making dinner!
Recently, I’ve given up on the idea of balance. I like the idea, of course–I think it’s part of all of us that harkens back to Eden. Perfect harmony, gentle rhythms. Who wouldn’t want that? But enter original sin, and the possibility that life can exist like a perfectly stacked tower totally collapses.
The world is broken, and as long as we live in it, we will necessarily be shifting our balance to keep from capsizing. I guess you could say we will always be counterbalancing. Once we accept that as our normal, we lower the level of frustration for our failed attempts at ‘balance.’ We also save some of the enormous amounts of energy trying to achieve and exist in perfect equilibrium.
In our creative lives, really our co-creating with God, this is particularly important. If we spend all of our energy and concentration trying to achieve total order, we will never be able to make progress on those big, deep projects.
Social media post, update website, schedule interview, oops…I’m three years behind on my book project!
Sad but true.
I now know with certainty that if I am going to gain momentum on what’s most important in any given season, other things will have to be allowed to fall apart, at least for a while. I will be conscious of it, strategic about it, and monitor how long and how far things will “fall.” But I can’t live in a perpetual state of plate-spinning. No one finished a marathon while juggling. And I now know that I can’t either, while playing the long game of creative work. So I step over the plates on the floor and keep going. There’s no other way.
The book The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan helped me immensely in this area. “The reason we shouldn’t pursue balance is that the magic never happens in the middle; magic happens at the extremes,” they write. In other words, big breakthroughs and massive, life-changing “magic” – let’s call it co-creative movement forward with God – come at a cost.
The cost is the safety of center and the comfort of balance. Trying to manage writing, communicating, and my creative life in the balanced middle means that what requires everything of me–leading the retreat, writing the talk, finishing the book–will get squeezed out of the calendar while I am keeping all the other things spinning, perfectly balanced, in the air.
But there was one important clarification in The One Thing that I really appreciated. When we talk about choosing one thing at the expense of others, we are talking about our creative (or professional) work. There, we must be able to let things drop for the sake of what we discern is our most important contribution at the moment.
But that’s not true for the people in our lives.
So while in our creative lives, we may swing widely in one direction or another for a season, we must be unwilling to go too far afield where our duties–and our hearts–lie.
Still tainted by sin and weakness, family life or home responsibilities will always have us shifting and counterbalancing, too. But we must be quicker to shift the weight and right the boat, never getting too far off-center. Dropping balls is one thing. Dropping people is another. “Your personal life,” the authors point out, “requires tight counterbalancing.”
During this season, I’m helping one son discern college choices, fill out applications, and schedule visits. And while that might require more take-out dinners than usual or letting the laundry pile up, I can’t allow it to be at the expense of babysitting our grandchildren for his older brother or reading together with his younger one.
For a (very quick) minute, I was considering beginning a doctoral program in spiritual theology. I I knew it would require much of me, but when a colleague advised that its successful completion would mean sacrificing strong family bonds for a season, my decision was a quick–and hard–”no.”
However, I am fully committed to finishing a book project, and that means you won’t see me coaching writers 1-1 for the next few months or speaking anymore this spring. Those things are important to me–but right now, they are not my “one thing.” In that respect, I’m living off-balance. I have to.
Here’s the heart of it:
Whether or not to go out of balance isn’t really the question. The question is: “Do you go short or long?” In your personal life, go short and avoid long periods where you are out of balance. Going short lets you stay connected to all the things that matter most and move them along together. In your professional life, go long and make peace with the idea that the pursuit of extraordinary results may require you to be out of balance for long periods. Going long allows you to focus on what matters most, even at the expense of other, lesser priorities. In your personal life, nothing gets left behind. At work it’s required. (Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, The One Thing)
The success of your creative work, in this fallen world, demands the sacrifice of smaller, lesser goods. This is hard to swallow because we were made to know wholeness and balance–I believe we were made for it. But as Christians, we, more than most, know the value of sacrifice. We know that God finds it beautiful and worthy when we lay down lovely things for better ones. And that He is working all of it, even the dropped plates and off-kilter days and seasons, for our greatest good. There will come a time when we will live aligned and in perfect harmony. We won’t have to choose the one ‘thing’ – we will, God willing, be in union with the One for whom we did it all, anyway. Until then: steady, steady…whoops!