Fuck Balance

How to live like a tulip

Advice’s hamartia, the poor noun, is that once it’s offered, it’s almost always discarded. But sometimes there is a disrupting event, the lightning parallel strikes the head, and advice is given and taken like a glass of water. In this brief moment when our inborn contrarian takes a beat, there is a sweeping openness of mind–a still white state, where we can actually hear our mothers suggest that we hang cedar planks on our sweaters to prevent moth bites. I must have been in this vacant state when I heard: “Fuck balance.”

This advice was given by a screenwriting professor of mine who I had sensed to have in him, unmistakably, the stuff of life. He was a middle aged white man who had lived in China for an extended time, learning Tai Chi and studying the Tao De Ching. He was wise and easy and now I can’t believe in such a thing as wise and serious. Only minutes into my first day, I opened a second tab next to my class notes and named it Notes on Peter.

Nature doesn’t subscribe to balance, I have jotted down from then. When the wind blows west, the tulip bends west, when the wind blows east, the tulip bends east.

Someone had asked about the work-life balance. Peter shrugged, then admitted: “Sometimes I spend too much time with my work and my family life suffers, sometimes I spend too much time with my family and my work life suffers.”

This was his resolute answer. Which is to say that the question of work-life balance was a tension to accept, not a problem to be solved.

I am glad to have heard this when I was 19 and especially tender toward any ideology that told me I was one step away from a painless life if I could only just – whatever it was. It’s hard to miss. A “balanced lifestyle” is the grounds on which the majority of influencers build their content; the regimented mix of self-care and work and clean hair and decorated desks and boundaries and brand parties. (Two personalities fighting for custody over me, and there is a video split between pilates classes and music festivals. 70% she says with a video the gym, the matcha, the journal and 30% she says over the cheeseburger, the martini, the club.) Why this formula continues to work seems clear enough–the key to attracting attention begins with exuding something aspirational, and the desirability of balance, as it appears, is having it all.

The irony is that a balanced life, unlike a balanced scale, can’t be measured objectively. The science of the 1:1 ratio does not hold up to daily life; you do not aim to spend an hour brushing your teeth to balance an hour of exercise to balance an hour of work to balance an hour of sleep. The commonly considered balanced diet, for instance, is an asymmetric eighty-percent healthy food and twenty-percent junk. Even though the 80:20 is a framework I more or less try for, what would I have to say, standing in front of a Neapolitan 94-year-old with a belly as glad as a baby’s, never denying himself of meat, smoke, or wine, who will die more happily than I will ever live? The criteria for what makes a balanced life is evidently subjective, differing vastly between cultures and value systems, or, in the largest sense, between what your mother thinks and what your father tells you.

All pared down, a balanced life stands on the same tightrope as a perfect one. That it’s in fact just as unattainable, sourced from the same wound of needing control, eludes us, because moderation appears to be a modest pursuit.

I should take no longer time to say that I happen to be a control freak. That I organize my days by to-do lists color blocked on Google calendar, colors it took me too long to decide on, and that a particular sense of serenity comes to me by looking at the week at large, pleased by the crossed off and greyed out blue and purple hues. I track my protein, I set timers when I sit down to work, I assign myself due dates, I have never, in my life, been accused of going with the flow. That I could potentially put my life into perfectly rationed categories is especially seductive to me. Yet I have found, in both my work and relationships, that when I bend with the wind when it blows, something better than my calendar happens.

Bruce Springsteen called this 1 + 1 = 3. I have the live performance of Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out saved where he patters before the song: “One plus one equals two is what happens every day. But when 1 +1 = 3, that’s when your life changes. Those are the days when the world around you brings down the spirit, and you feel blessed to be alive.”

If you commit yourself to balance you will never know the epic romance of 1 + 1 = 3, which is to say you will never know the thrill of 100%. As I’ve known it, I can credit the most expansive periods of my life to stretching to this measure, to rise to the invited occasion. Relevant in work in relationships, absolutely vital to creativity. In fact periods of stagnancy and periods of inspiration have needed the same degree of surrender. Is it that in one extreme you sew and in the other you reap? The wind isn’t always blowing in any case. In plain weather there is time for to-do lists, unprocessed foods, and days like yesterday and tomorrow. It is the question of allowing the fling. The bender. I suppose because of Peter, because of the Taoist ideas he instilled into my creative practice, I consider the wind to be a benevolent thing. I can trust the thing that I’m at the mercy of, because I have seen, ultimately, at least in some psychic way, if I give myself to it, it takes care of me.

I recently watched a lecture given at the Harvard Business School in 2013 called Building A Life and felt once again cemented in this philosophy when the lecturer said that in the recipe of a fulfilled life, he did not believe in pursuing balance. “Unfortunately,” he concedes, “it’s more realistic to learn how to juggle.”

Which is to say you will drop the ball, but that this would merely be a symptom of living fully. This is not a call for self-abandon, or to abandon others. This is a suggestion, rather, to aim to operate from less control, from less of an assumption that your calendar always contains the best plans, and essentially, to trust. Please do not make the mistake of thinking the path of ease is easy. I promise you I am as guilty and scared as you are. In any case. If you don’t take my advice, at least consider the tulip’s.