Balanced Life
The scale that really matters
In my opinion, the scale that really matters is the one that weighs our lives. When I was a kid, struggling to become an Olympic athlete, to be a good student, and to take care of personal relationships, I used to see three important categories in my life: school, sport, and friends. At that time, I thought it was impossible to succeed in all of them at the same time. I was so hard on myself. As an adult looking at that kid now, I would like to give her a hug because I now recognize how tremendously difficult it is to achieve a balanced life. It’s hard, but worthwhile, work. The three most important categories have changed for me lately, but the problems of keeping them balanced remain. However, I fight for that balance everyday and I try to be gentle with myself if I’m not able to achieve it perfectly. Everyone can make as many important life categories as they like, but I think that three is a good number to work with.
Compartmentalizing
I am not a math fan, but I do love to see everything clear and organized in my mind. If you close your eyes and you think about your current life, how many important categories do you see? You can picture them in different shapes or different colors, you can give them a name or different percentages. Personally, I see 3 different bubbles: work, family, and friends, and one smaller bubble that is connected to all of them: self-care. Those are the things that are most important to me. I have found it essential to keep them stable, and lately I discovered the importance of taking care of myself in order to be able to balance my other categories.
My three big categories have more or less the same weight. When I was a kid, family was not a category on my mind because I didn’t realize at the time that I had to take care of it. Now, as a mother of two, it is my responsibility to take care of family in the same way my parents and relatives did for me growing up. Work, I need it for so many reasons, and friends. I love having friends, I love dedicating every single penny of my life to them.
How do I make my categories balanced
I wish I could have a magic wand that created thousands of Giorgias to work on all the different categories in my life, but unfortunately that’s not an option. So, what I try to do is jump from one category to another, while trying to always do a pit stop at the self-care intersection along the way. My self-care consists of sports, eating healthy, watching tv series or reading books, and very basic skin care. When I give to one of the categories I try to weigh the energy that I spent there to see when it’s time to take a break and maybe move on to other self-care or to another category entirely. That’s my technique and it obviously requires a lot of effort in setting boundaries and introspection. In my case, work and family are the most needy and I have to be careful to not get stuck there. I can tell that this method works but I am not going to lie, it's not easy. Somedays, it’s way easier to stay in one of the categories. But the problem with that is, when we close our eyes and we look at the big picture it is not balanced anymore. Don’t be too hard on yourself, but if having a well balanced life is one of your life goals it’s worth trying.
