BALANCE (A Five-Minute Friday Post)

I had to think about this one for a bit, so I'm late posting.

There has been so much written about work/life balance in the past several years, and I've found it an elusive thing.  Everybody's chasing it, and nobody thinks they've achieved the magical state of perfect balance.

Well, we all know there's no such thing, so why do people keep writing about it?  And why do we devour the books and articles supposedly giving us the answer?  Are we crazy?  Unbalanced?  (HA!)

So if it's unreachable, what do we do?

First of all, we need to redefine what "balance" is.  The books and magazines and seminars make it sound like we need to balance our time every day, or at least every week.

I've decided it's a lot of hooey (that's a highly technical term, if you didn't know).

Life goes through stages, and overall, if you're paying attention, it does balance, eventually.  Think about it.  When you have small children and you're working, I'm sorry, you're just naturally going to be focused on small children things, and it's difficult to focus on your spouse (if you're married) and work at that stage.  Oh, you're focused on work, too, but really, it's a vehicle to provide for those small children.  And the spouse should be focused on the kid stuff, too, and take some of the pressure off.  Some weeks, you'll have to have kid stuff in the front of your brain.   Other weeks, you'll be all work.  I used to travel for my job, and I'd be away from home overnight from time to time.  We figured it out.

When the kids were older and into sports and Scouts and stuff, I got involved in their activities, and my weekends and some weeknights were full of that stuff - meetings and practices and games.  I chose to be involved in those things.  I took vacation days from work to go to Boy Scout or Girl Scout camp.  But when I was at work, I worked like mad.  And on the weekends, That Man did the kid stuff, too.

Just because you can't be there all day doesn't mean you're a bad parent.  Everybody does what they can with what they have.  Some stages are easier, some stages are harder.  Eventually, some of your time becomes yours again.  You can work, and advance, too.  But you have to pick your battles and decide what you're willing to do, and what you're not willing to do.

Remember, it's only temporary!  EVERYTHING is only temporary.  It's all about choices and what you do with them.  It all balances out in the end.

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This post is part of the Five-Minute Friday link-up.  Today's writing prompt was "BALANCE."  For more information on Five-Minute Friday, click here.