I am an ardent fan of the reviews available on the Internet . Whether it is about finding a good movie to watch or a good place to dine in, I always resort to checking out the reviews available online before making what they call as an “Informed decision”!!! So when I was looking for a job, it felt nothing unusual when I was going through the reviews of the employees available on various sites about various companies. They were all fairly following a pattern and were quite relatable. Something that I just could not digest is when the term “Work – Life Balance” crops up… Call it Great or bad, I just don’t understand what it means….
Then I embarked on a journey to figure out this. My first stop was a dictionary and it said “The number of hours you spend per week working, compared to the number of hours you spend with your family, relaxing etc. ” Hmm.. Interesting but this opened room for more questions in my mind. For Eg. I can always arrive at it mathematically but what defines a balance? Does it mean a 50-50 is good? or does it mean if the spending time with family is more than spending time at work its balanced?
Well definitions were not really helping and so I took to the task of gathering opinions. I asked some of my colleagues and friends on what does “Work-Life Balance” mean to them. And I got a wide variety of responses ranging from ” the luxury of getting a proper sleep of 6 hours at least once a week” to “a perfect 5 day work week (coupled with some e-mails over weekends, sigh!!!”) Nothing conclusive here either because it was almost a case of “to each his own!!!”
Having failed at arriving a conclusion, I decided to read a few self help books, listen to motivational speeches, podcasts and even some stand up comedies on the topic 🙂 🙂 :). There were interesting insights but none that could put out the question in my head. So I decided to do the next best thing- To just let it be…
Now that I have given up running behind it, I have started realizing that may be there is nothing tangible which can be called as a work – life balance. Our life is more like a compartment structure with a possibility to create infinite compartments within a finite space. And that finite space is the time that we have from the day we are born to the day we cease to exist as a mortal being. At every given point in time, we convince ourselves that a certain compartment needs more space than the other. And once that phase fades, we switch the importance to another compartment. So on and so forth. This just means that coining a word with a “balance” attached as a suffix is just creating another myth because in reality there can never be a balance. One always takes precedence over the other. Sometimes its work and sometimes its not…
Contrary to my own beliefs, I felt a lot more relieved in knowing that there actually exists nothing called a perfect work- life balance. Now that its established as non-existent, that’s one less thing to be worried about not having!!!!. Which then made me realize that embracing an imperfection or an imbalance is making my life a lot more easier.
So the moral of the story is that I still find it funny when I read about work life balance on the internet but at least now I know that the beauty is not really in struggling to find that balance but is in embracing the imbalance and making it possible for oneself to stay happy at all times, no matter what…..