The Great Balancing Act (or, Little Frogs Can’t Jump)

I was unpre­pared
Balancing the scales 
I did the best I could but still I have failed.

~Barlow and Bear

Have you ever heard of the pump­kin toadlet? It is a very, very small frog from Brazil (all toads are frogs; the two terms are tax­o­nom­i­cal­ly mean­ing­less). These cuties, which could eas­i­ly fit on your thumb­nail, have the small­est vestibu­lar sys­tem of any ver­te­brate on record. Because the bones in their ears are so small, the flu­id doesn’t move through the tubes prop­er­ly. The result is a frog that has no under­stand­ing of where its body is in space. This lack of spa­tial ori­en­ta­tion makes hop­ping a chal­lenge. The jump goes pret­ty well, but the land­ing? Not so much. They hur­tle their lit­tle bod­ies into space, and then roll or flip, crash-land­ing on their backs. They lit­er­al­ly have no sense of balance. 

Watch their adorable “jumps” here (you’re welcome).

Balance. We all want it. But just like those adorable lit­tle frogs, we ain’t ever gonna get it. In my book Sensible Wellness for Women, I wrote that bal­ance is a mov­ing tar­get. Now I think that bal­ance is, well, a myth. 

It’s a gen­er­a­tional illu­sion. Growing up, we were made to believe that if we could only adjust the knobs on the var­i­ous seg­ments of our lives to get the lev­els per­fect, we could have it all. And by all, I mean sus­tain­able peace, ful­fill­ment, and hap­pi­ness in our fam­i­ly life, careers, rela­tion­ships, finances, hob­bies, and spir­i­tu­al endeavors. 

But not only can we not have it all, we can’t even have most of it all of the time. With every knob we turn, instead of get­ting more bal­anced, we find our­selves more stressed and more out of bal­ance. If I take on more clients to shore up my finances, it means giv­ing short shrift to my ever-grow­ing tbr (to be read) pile. If I focus on spend­ing time with my fam­i­ly and friends, the result is less time and ener­gy toward mar­ket­ing my busi­ness. When my work day is done, I can read on the porch, cook a nutri­tious meal for my fam­i­ly, work on Instagram con­tent, take a nap, take a walk, or lis­ten to a pod­cast. But I can’t do them all. 

There is no per­fect lev­el because our reserves of time, mon­ey, and ener­gy are lim­it­ed, despite what those moti­va­tion­al speak­ers on Instagram say (I’m look­ing at you Tim Ferris, with your eye-rolling 4‑Hour Workweek where you blithe­ly advise being born rich and hav­ing assis­tants do all the heavy lifting).

The word bal­ance comes from the Latin bilanx, mean­ing hav­ing two scale pans. Perhaps we could actu­al­ly bal­ance our life scales for a moment if every­thing would just stop and stand still. But still­ness is just anoth­er illu­sion. The ground we assume so steady under our feet is, on a small scale, swirling atoms and, from a larg­er per­spec­tive, just anoth­er rock whizzing through the cos­mos in its orbit dance. Movement is our only promise, and the scales swing and sway.

The true work of liv­ing isn’t ever done … until it is. But while this side of the dirt, I’m hurtling through space. Better I hurl myself into liv­ing like that cute lit­tle toadlet than risk becom­ing immo­bile from the fear of falling.