How do you define a life of Balance?
I’m so excited. By now most of you have heard my big news—I am on the coast FULL-TIME! (Or at least my new version of full-time, working four days a week.) It’s about quality of life which relates to balance in my life. For the last two years I have been running two practices and commuting back and forth to the city to keep them going. I was working six days a week. It meant early ferries and long commutes and a few nights a week away from my family.
At first I liked the challenge of running two practices. It was fun going back and forth between two worlds, taking on a new venture here while having the stability of an established practice in the city. Surprisingly, even the ferry commute had its charms. But inevitably the reality of a six-day workweek began to take its toll and I found it harder to regain my energy on the shortened weekend before going back to the longer workweek. That fine life balance that I coach patients on was getting harder to sustain, as I had less and less time for my family and all my other pursuits.
Quality of life is going to mean different things to different people. So how would I define “quality of life”? I believe it’s a balance between the things I value in life that are meaningful and important to me: my family, my health, and my quest for understanding, of which I can pass on to others to help them improve their quality of life.
The concept of “balance” is key here and it’s a tricky one because really it’s a fiction. We learn and grow by being stretched, which means pushing ourselves out of balance. We tend to think of balance as a point, a center, a particular place. But balance is really a constant redirecting back towards that point. The healthiest organisms are the ones that can adapt to the farthest limits away from that center point without causing damage or harm to themselves. This is how we grow. We learn by being stretched, which means pushing ourselves out of balance, but still within our physiological limits. (Notice I didn’t say our comfort zone.) We expand and stretch ourselves, but we don’t hurt ourselves. Hopefully this is a continuous lifelong process: stretch, expand, come back to center, grow. This applies to every sphere of our lives—physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.
My life was too far out of balance, which is what happens when we exceed our limits too much, too far, or too often. Whether it’s intentional or not, I think it’s a normal part of life to go in and out of this balance. The trick is to recognize it and make appropriate adjustments. For me it was too little family time, not enough sleep, and not enough time on the areas of my life that keep me in growth mode. Maggi and I knew when we started this grand adventure that having two practices would be limited and, fortunately, the universe conspired at exactly the right moment to help us with our timeline! Now I can focus more time on my Sechelt practice and my amazing patients here on the Coast.