Achieving Balance

Remember when cell phones, faxes and email were going to give us a huge amount of free time?

[The reader pauses for a moment of bitter amusement. Smirks at the very idea of taking time off and spits coffee on the keyboard.]

Rather than being awash in leisure time, we struggle to stay afloat in a stormy sea of rising expectations. Unlike the old days, where one could respond to this week’s letter by sometime next week and still be in the game, we now receive emails in the morning and nervous queries if we haven’t answered by early afternoon.

This stress extends to our vacations. If we take time off, we cut it short or feel compelled to weave in some self-development activity in order to justify the leisure. Some of us are so addicted to work that we haul laptops to beaches and email from airports, thus keeping the electronic umbilical cord to Mother Office.

This sense of haste has been with us for some time. (Years ago, Calvin Trillin wrote that Americans drive across the country as if someone’s chasing them.) In some respects, the technology has simply worsened an already bad habit.

In a work-centered universe, everything becomes a job. Members of "The Greatest Generation" would have never agreed to the karate, soccer, piano, and French lessons that turn today’s children into little careerists and their parents into chauffeurs. The older generation would have advised their kids to go outside and watch clouds instead of worrying about getting into Yale.

Walter Kerr, in his prophetic book on the decline of pleasure, wrote in the 1960s about how even the universities were infected by a desire for gravitas. Liberal arts subjects were transformed into "sciences" as government majors became political science majors and so on. It supposedly conferred more status, like changing from Personnel to Human Resources, but the substance was the same and the underlying message was clear: We are very serious people.

Perhaps that is the theme of our society. It's not a bad one, but I suspect that much of the activity is activity for activity's sake. The worker who appears to work the hardest is not always the most productive and is probably far from being the happiest. The serious person may not be the most profound.

I don’t have a magic solution and anything proposed here should be regarded as coming from a wounded healer. There are, however, four key ingredients to any cure. They involve lowering our standards, gaining time to think, playing to our strengths, and creating a zone of indifference.

Lowering our standards. We can’t do it all. Why pretend that we can? I know many very bright men and women and there’s not a "Renaissance person" in the bunch. Cancel that Mandarin Chinese lesson if all it does is induce guilt. Reduce your magazine subscriptions. This is one of those areas in which less can be more.

Get some time to think. When you see people chatting on cell phones while in traffic, consider how many of those calls are truly essential. Perhaps five to ten percent maximum. There is a peace that comes with being hard to reach. Gandhi used to reserve a time period each week during which he would not speak. People could talk to him and he would write notes, but that was it. Find a coffee shop or library where you can sit and simply think. Do that for at least one hour a week.

Playing to our strengths. Rather than wasting time on improving weaknesses, let’s focus on what we do well and, dare I say it, what we enjoy. We stand a reasonable chance of success in those areas. The other stuff will only depress and frustrate us.

Creating a zone of indifference. If we are going to worry about something, let’s make sure it is worth our time and within our control. Everything else gets moved into the zone of indifference. Once there, they become non-subjects. You do not have to have a detailed stance on U.S. relations with Bolivia or whether elementary schools should require uniforms.

These aren’t perfect, but they are a start. Let me know if you've discovered any others.