Balance and Boundaries in a Hectic Time
It’s a particular time in life where I perceive that things should be calm.
And yet, they are anything but calm.
They should be calm for me because the university is out for spring semester. Summer semester has started for a few online students, but otherwise, things have become a bit quieter at the school. Except: The department I am working for is in transition with new leadership; I’m adding to my administrative workload there; my children are in the final 3 weeks of school (a.k.a, the busiest time of the school year); my husband is shouldering more responsibility for our church community which causes him to be in more meetings and away from home a fair bit more frequently.
Have you ever looked around your life and thought, “Wait! This is supposed to be the easy part of the year! What about work-life balance?”
Let’s talk about “What I should do when things aren’t slowing down. What should I do when I feel overwhelmed from the old responsibilities I said yes to many months or years ago (see my last post) as well as the new things I am excited to say yes to?”
It may be a time of reckoning.
Reckon with your Responsibilities
The first thing is to reckon with what you have on your plate. ChatGPT gave me several definitions of “reckoning,” but the two that were most applicable were these:
Settlement of Accounts: It often implies a settling of accounts or debts, where everything is accounted for and balanced.
Consequence or Repercussions: Sometimes it is used to mean the consequences or outcomes of actions that must be faced.
We must face (look, look, always look) all of the responsibilities and roles that we’re playing in life. Fred Rogers gives us a helpful and uncomplicated understanding of responsibilities. Years ago, our girls were watching the episode on pets (Ep #1497) and the definition he offered for responsibility left an impression on me.
“It’s a responsibility to take care of somebody’s pet like that. Do you know what responsibility means? It’s a big word. But the first part of it, response, is like “answer.” You know, when someone says hello to you, you answer that person and you say hello back to them. But when you’re taking care of a dog, you need to answer, or respond when the dog is hungry or needs to go outside. It’s your responsibility to answer to the dog’s needs. I like Barney, but before I said I’d take care of him, I had to think about the responsibility. And I want to ask Mrs. Rogers if she thinks it’s all right, too.”
So when you have said yes to something, you’re taking responsibility. You’re promising to answer when there is a need or demand. It’s simple to think of this in terms of our work, either at home or workplace. But there are other responsibilities we’ve taken on. Hobbies can become responsibilities, as can being in good relationship with family and friends. We connect in ways that require a response.
What does reckoning look like? Honestly, sitting down and quietly thinking through all the tasks and requirements that are haunting you, and connecting them to a role that you function in.
Set Boundaries
Boundaries are lines that tell us what we are saying yes to and no to. There are all kinds of boundaries: physical, emotional, psychological, work, relational, and more. In this particular discussion, having good boundaries means understanding what we’re taking on and what we’re not.
A good way to think of boundaries is through this picture:
The landowner on one side is responsible to mind, plant, and care for the side on which his boundary line falls. What if he crawled over and started taking care of the land on the other side, because that landowner didn’t take care of his responsibility? Well, two things:
1) the first farmer would have a high risk of becoming overwhelmed and burned out.
And 2) the landowner that should be taking responsibility would be avoiding the responsibilities that he said he would take on.
There’s a famous saying, “Let your yes be yes, and your no be no.” When we say we’ll be responsive and we’re not, we are becoming inadvertently untruthful. And beyond our own possible burnout and overwhelm, we also risk letting others down when we can’t do what we say we’ll do.
As you think through your responsibilities, begin to ponder what you’re able to either stop completely, or adjust who takes responsibility for that. Examples of delegation could be housework, asking for your supervisor to help you prioritize the tasks you’ve been given, so that you might delete some tasks from the list. Or you might have a conversation about your finances with your spouse to prioritize the financial goals you have and focus your efforts on the direction you want to go.
Achieve Balance – but not the way you think
As time continues and we move through life, change comes too. With that change, we might say no to new opportunities or stop old things we took on in a different season. Each of us must learn what we really need and want to do. But achieving balance isn’t something static. Instead, it’s more like this:
Richard Pratt, a former professor of mine, says, “Balance is momentary synchronicity on the shifting deck of life.”
I love this photo because it reminds me that the deck of life can be at an intense angle. But if we’re able to bend and adjust appropriately, as the person on the far right of the boat is, our legs may not be even – but we are balanced.
This is an incredibly helpful mindset when we’re making our way through life.
We’ll never achieve a static balance, but we can achieve an adaptive balance. Steps in doing so are to reckon with the responsibilities that we’ve already taken on, set boundaries appropriately, and be ready to adapt when life shifts on us – for good or when hard.
