The most frequent advice I hear busy scientists give each other is this: “You’ve got to find balance in your life.” Balance between the work we think is required, and the life we feel we are missing.
A simple Buddhist teaching can help us feel better about this desired, yet mythical, ‘balance’. The easement comes with our recognition of the impermanence of all things.
First, let us consider ‘finding balance’, which is a common piece of advice in the American workplace. The fact that we hear it spoken of so often is troubling. Here are just a few of the many questions we should be asking ourselves about balance:
- What is it about our work that makes us feel balance in life is missing?
- What is it about our culture that has us thinking everyone should be happily balanced?
- Why do we feel it necessary to tell other people that they need balance?
- What is being unbalanced like, and is it necessarily a bad thing?
When someone says, “You should find balance!” it can seem as if the speaker has actually found that balance. You might think he/she is wondering sadly why you have not. You might even think, “Maybe balanced people are common, and they all know something important that I have failed to discover.”
Let these thoughts be, but do not encourage them. Remind yourself that anyone who recommends you ‘find balance’ has likely not found balance either. That is because the kind of balance we are referring to is rarely possible for any useful length of time.
If you catch yourself thinking these folks are right, you have an opportunity to turn it around. What we need to recognize about balance is this: the 'balance' humans seek cannot exist because everything is impermanent.
Impermanence is a fact of the natural world. All things change. Everything! Moment by moment, even you change: cell by cell, you are different. Winter comes, then spring. A plan is made, then an unexpected occurrence changes that plan. It is the normal way of things.
University professors are very busy people, so balance is often advised among us. But the minute we 'balance' our schedules between, say, the research and teaching demands of a semester, we are informed that we will be in charge of a new faculty hire, or a review of the curriculum, or the development of a grant for the department. Our plans of a moment ago just went 'out the window'.
On it goes, day after day. We might make an attempt to return to our plan, but the carefully constructed balance is already gone. It is not a failing of ours to lack this type of balance in such an ever-changing world.
Impermanence is real, and the balance we crave cannot withstand it. Given the nature of change, should we ever expect to find balance in a dynamic situation too populated with tasks? Wouldn’t it be kinder to ourselves and others if we were simply to expect change instead?
Planning will always occur in the workplace, and we shouldn’t abandon planning efforts simply because everything changes. We can, however, foster a different view about the interruption of a plan, each 'unfortunate' turn in the trajectory of our predicted events. All happenings arise on a momentary basis, and they create opportunities for flexing, but not for balance.
While we retrain ourselves to think in this way, it would be helpful to refrain from chastising our colleagues about not finding enough balance in their lives. And it would be more fair to evaluate others with an appreciation that balance in an impermanent world is simply not a valid expectation.
Flex, and do your best!
