Boundaries, Membranes, Gestalts.
A colleague worried about work. It was going well, but they wondered if it could take over their life...
A colleague worried about work. It was going well, but they wondered if it could take over their life. What did their boundaries need to be? What was the right balance? Would something good become too much?
I’ve also found work to be demanding over the past 18 months. The pandemic, with its personal loss, blurring of work and home, and tension, has displaced us. It's a good time to take stock of my own views on balance.
I found it useful to start with the position of work in the American Zeitgeist. We’re structured and cultured to take part in it, to desire to advance in it, to derive meaning from it. At the extremes of this spectrum, some of us work to live or live to work. Whatever our priorities are, we’re engaged in a debate about the divide between what we call life and work. This piece is about navigating the impact of that divide.
Our limited time and energy create zero-sum games between the participants. That in turn sets up boundaries, but "boundaries" is an interesting word. We talk of the separation they impose, but what of their permeance? Our work and life have at least one thing in common - us. What we do changes us as we travel between the phases of our existence.
Sometimes it's life that affects work. It took me three years after starting my job to realize that more than half the team had an unspoken uniform of blacks, greys, and sneakers. It hadn't started that way.
Colleagues with kids describe how their young ones change the way they approach work. There's a new line defining what's globally important, and it's not always about scarcity. “Be childlike, not childish”, I remember one of them telling me.
I’ve seen athletes rely on past training to manage adversity. They can miss the clear rules from their sporting days.
Of course, this influence goes both ways.
My work mentors changed the way I viewed personal energy, relationships, and commitments. I looked up to these guides, I knew they knew me, and I found their advice easy to apply. I don’t think I’d have changed in my life if I hadn’t gotten aid from outside it. And, on days when I do lose my handle on things, I miss chores, snap, and lose my intention.
If we do something a lot, that activity will shape us. An aversion to this change is paradoxical. We're already experiencing it. So taking ownership of that change is what we’re left with.
All this makes me want to reframe these boundaries. They’re membranes. They hold some things back, and let others through. Through filtering and osmosis, they help form the organs of our life.
Back to my colleague’s point. How to handle something too good, or bad, becoming too much?
Any section of our life can turn tough, frustrating, misaligned, or out of our control. Are we doing it right? Are we giving up on the better pars to run out the clock?
Fighting to limit one of these worries can make us play from a position of fear. Considering their contributions to the whole helps us confront this fear. Our gestalt. The big picture. Building a mental image of it is a pursuit of courage and experimentation.
The ingredients of our experiences do deserve attention. Those parts that influence each other, and ones that sit alone. Our environment, desires, fears, relationships. They relate to our expectations. They are assets to our futures. Putting them together gives us a chance to make a life that we can influence.
I’ll end this with a story that these thoughts made me remember.
My mom, navigating a scientific career in India, sat in a physics lecture that had her immersed. She was pregnant with my older brother at the time. She recalls feeling him kick in response to her engagement with the material. She’d managed the whole gamut of obstacles, luck, and opportunity to get to that room. She’d manage a lot more, in the years to come, including research, my brother, and me. Call me nostalgic for perceiving this, but my brother always displayed a love for physics and systems. He still mentions going back to get his Ph.D. one day. Once his kids are set, of course.
PS - This is for anyone finding their balance, and using everything they get to tackle the rest.