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When my kids were little, I sat up nights to find a solution for perfect work/life balance. How could I be present at home, grow as a person, earn money, and feel good about my life and parenting? Should I stop work, or continue? Switch careers, or double down? Flexible hours? Part time work? More support at home?
I wrote hypothetical schedules and budgets, read articles and forum posts and whipped myself into a general frenzy of guilt and frustration, before I fell into bed each night, head spinning. This went on for years, and the days in between these nights were spent living – doing the best I could, day to day, while I waited for the answer to reveal itself.
It never did. It never has.
But somehow, my children have grown up, my business has chugged on, and I haven't gone bankrupt or been charged with child neglect.
So it goes.
I do this kind of wishful absolutism at work, too. If I could just land the model, programme, tool, or setup, I’d be sorted. The perfect workshop. The ideal workflow. The best website.
It doesn't work like that though, does it? Nothing's perfect - and even if it was, life would change, I would change, or both.
Most important things involve juggling critical but competing values.
In my work-life, public leadership is a clear example of this. The need to deliver long term, intergenerational outcomes within short-term budgets and electoral cycles. The softening of policy positions to make them socially or politically palatable.
In my writing-life, compelling stories and characters are the ones caught in tricky moral quandaries without obvious solutions. The characters who stay with us long after reading aren’t stereotypes - they’re contradictory, dynamic, frustrating beasts that do things we don’t expect and make choices we can’t fathom.
The engine of any story is tension. This is as true for your life as a novel or film.
The engine of any story is tension.
This is as true for your life as it is for a novel or film.
A meaningful life takes the shape of your most excruciating tensions. The work of the public leader is not to eliminate or resolve competing values, but to compromise and negotiate (plus absorb constant criticism and disappointment), hoping each trade-off compounds into something that matters.
This is our work, too.
Rich, full lives are built on tension. We devote ourselves to our family, our spouse, and our careers - and we scramble to reconstitute ourselves, booking classes we don't take, starting hobbies we don't finish, experiencing the elation of squeezing in a run or watching a favourite TV show.
We build systems, write lists, and contort our calendars into disciplined little slots, all the while trying to stay open to opportunity, have space for deep work, be creative and interesting. We try to live a moral life, an ethical life, one that gives voice to the vulnerable - and we sacrifice those principles every time we go to work, swipe our credit card, or stay quiet at drinks.
We convince ourselves we're failing, without realising none of the most important things in our lives can ever be solved simply or permanently. At least, not without intolerable consequences.
A long string of imperfect days and small mistakes can add up to something pretty special. It might be the only thing that does.
Happy Wednesday,
AM
Handy tips from an amateur juggler
Here's a few tips for how to fight the good fight, from someone trying to finish this piece before school pickup.
- Name the tension. You can't work with what you can't see. More overwhelm and impotence is caused by mental and emotional tension than tangible logistics. Naming the values at stake can disentangle them from your internal orchestra. Challenge your first response: what is this really about? i.e. you're saying you're worried about money, but are you? Or are you scared of giving up an identity, or freedom, or a way to prove your worth?
- Be aware of your default. In which direction do you more naturally swing? Toward freedom, or commitment? Integrity or flexibility? In which direction is your team or organisation more prone? Speed or inertia? Resisting your default isn’t always necessary, but needs more energy and grace when you do.
- Honour the in-betweens and good-enoughs. All or nothing thinking is a trap. Few important choices are binary, even if they look that way. There are 25 permutations of work-life balance in between stay at home mum and 60-hour week. The daily workarounds are, in the end, our days.
- Make temporary choices. Most things can be revisited and many undone, even if they feel existential. Do what's right for your season or scenario and know you'll adjust it as you go – when the kids are older, the weather is better, the money less tight.
