Your
picture in that cute little mortarboard keeps appearing in my social media
feed. Your pose of achievement is surpassed only by the pride in your family’s
eyes. You have completed thousands of tiny tasks to reach this milestone. And
now you are running off to the next one.
And that’s
why I want to talk to you about see saws. You remember the ones on your
kindergarten playground. Or you might have thought about your Physics lessons
on fulcrums the moment you read that word. Can you feel yourself going up in
the air and then down to push your feet against the dirt so you can rise again.
You remember what it feels like to get stuck up in the air or bogged down on
the ground.
See saws
are my favorite metaphor for the balance of life. People call it work life
balance, but I’ve never felt that term was accurate. For the longest season of
our lives, work is a significant part of life, not separate from it. In other
seasons our primary work is school or raising families. Even in retirement, we
have the work of maintaining our assets and the work of giving back. So let’s
just call it life balance instead of work life balance.
The kind
of balance that you have riding a see saw comes by moving in rhythmic fashion. Life
is like that. As long as you don’t stay in one part of your life too long, you
can keep a sense of balance. You just have to keep moving between your responsibilities
with some level of rhythm. If you spend long hours on work or school or hobbies
at the sacrifice of rest or time with family and friends, you will feel stuck
in one see saw position. If you have so
much leisure time that other responsibilities suffer, you will feel stuck in
another see saw position. If you take a snapshot of a seesaw at any point, it
will look unbalanced. But if you take a video over time as your see saw moves
up and down, then you see it as keeping balance. Same goes for your life. Keep
it moving to keep it balanced.
The
advice that liberated me was “There is time for everything, but not all at the
same time.” Sometimes my see saw patterns were measured in minutes and
sometimes in long seasons. When my children were small, I put away certain
hobbies and then picked them back up again decades later. And there were moments
when I stood up from my desk and took a five minute walk and then returned to
my deadline. Both sought balance.
The Ecclesiastes
writer embraced this notion.
For
everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to
die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is
planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to cast away stones ,and a time to gather
stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from
embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace. [Ecclesiastes
3:1-8]
So Graduate, there is a time for everything you were
purposed on this earth to do. Pace yourself. You don’t have to do it all right
now. Neither is this license to mooch off your folks for too long! But stay on
the see saw and keep it moving.
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