My audition for TEDxWhistler
Are You A Work-Life Balance Impostor?
I have had an awakening — The “work versus life” duality is a myth. What looks like a fine balance could be a misleading imbalance unless it derives from a deep sense of inner centredness.
After working as an economist in rigorous academic environments for over a decade, we moved to Whistler with our daughters a few years back. I was enamoured by the balanced lives the residents of this tiny, picturesque ski town seemed to be living. Children here mostly go to school only four days a week. The fifth day is spent blissfully skiing (or tumbling) down the mountain in the winter, or gleefully riding on bike trails in the forests. Ski school, bike camps, and real school are all equally important parts of their lives right from the start. Adults here lead them by example. A ski run before reaching the office at 9 a.m. or a hike around Lost Lake at lunchtime is not unusual. This neat division of work and play felt idyllic.
Corporate culture and the media make it sound like work and play are mutually exclusive. A healthy work-life balance means keeping them in tidy separate boxes and then trying to find the sweet spot where trading one for the other brings our worlds into a fine equilibrium.
By that yardstick, all of us in Whistler have nailed it, haven’t we?
And yet, I have a nagging feeling that the seemingly healthy work-life balance in my town, I just described may be yet another type of imbalance — a compulsive pursuit of achievement in sports arenas instead of on the corporate ladder.
At school drop-offs, I have overheard parents affectionately discussing the colours of casts their children were getting their injured ankles into. Or mothers casually remarking that all they expect from ski school this year is that their six-year-old can ski double black diamond slopes.
In my beloved hometown of Whistler, play quickly morphs into work.
Real, serious work.
Evidently, boundaries around work and play are, at best, fuzzy. Not only in Whistler, but across cities, industries and professions. And so, trading off one for the other often tips the scales far too much to either side, keeping us in a constant balancing act while the work-life balance we aspire to remains elusive.
During my reflective moments, I’ve come to realise that nothing about work is exhausting, exclusively. On the contrary, plenty of things we categorise as “life” can be soul-sapping — Ask a parent caught with endless loads of laundry on the weekend. And how about an ambitious founder, binge-watching on the weekend for a semblance of relaxation?
The missing balance is an indicator of tasks misaligned with their purpose. In fact, work that aligns with our inner purpose can be nourishing.
It is time we overhaul our very definition of balance. We must journey towards a new balance that makes us feel centred. I coined the term “Buddha Balance” to capture the essence of this new lens on work-life balance.
When I was a little girl, the serene look of Buddha idols fascinated me. The Buddha looked peaceful. My experience of a ten-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat in 2019 made me realize that his face displays a far subtler state of being, equanimity. The quality of being centred, in both desirable and less-than-desirable events.
Buddha Balance is the pursuit of such centredness at work and in the rest of our lives. It is an inner balance that comes from knowing that the only constant is change. And because every outcome is impermanent, it makes no sense to be obsessed with success or failure in our pursuits.
Our experiences and upbringing have programmed us to emphasize some aspects of life as more valuable than others. And usually, work gets the uppermost spot. As we go through life, though, these weights evolve. With Buddha Balance, the only compass that remains relevant to progress is how often we remain aligned with our inner centre in our day-to-day lives. The moment the balance tips towards energy-sapping activities more than centring ones, it is time to recalibrate.
Almost no one starts out being in Buddha Balance. We see-saw from one compulsion to another through life, driven by powerful external forces like paychecks, peer pressure, algorithms, the media, and so on.
Most of us buy into the “work versus life” trade-off by default. We start our careers focused on basic needs — food, house, stylish clothes, gadgets. The tool to fulfil those is money. So, in this stage, work-life balance is a trade-off between activities that make us money versus those that do not. Simple. Our inner purpose rarely even features in our thinking.
At the beginning of this year, Bill Gates shared his priorities for 2023 on his LinkedIn page. These include, right at the top — Becoming a grandfather and Being a good friend and father, followed by Progress in health and climate innovation and finally, helping shape AI advances in a positive way. Three decades ago, his list of priorities would likely have read — leading Microsoft to new frontiers like AI, eradicating malaria and other preventable diseases, and perhaps, also being a good father.
This evolution in the priorities of a leader like Bill Gates is not unique to him or his stature. It illustrates the path we all take, inching closer to Buddha Balance, one choice at a time. Over time, our definitions of success broaden. So does our sense of what balance means to us. One by one, we begin to include fitness, mental health, quality of life, relationships and causes we care about in measuring our accomplishments.
On its own, it could take an entire lifetime, if at all, for centredness to become our sole focus in all that we do. It is time we realise that no accomplishments in the external world can bring us a lasting sense of inner balance. Consciously engaging in pursuits that bring us to our inner centre, and minimising those that take us off-centre can. That is Buddha Balance.
When we can stay true to our inner purpose, untainted by external incentives, we naturally fall into Buddha Balance.
In the last three years of being a Whistlerite, I have thrown myself into every outdoor activity I find fascinating. I’ve swam in the lakes in summer, biked along the Valley trail in the Fall, hiked in the forests in Spring, tobogganed on my belly down a snowbank, learnt downhill skiing and Nordic skiing from scratch and returned to the slope after an injury, and snowshoed in knee deep snow in winter. Yet, I’ve also discovered that nothing is so centreing for me, as writing with a pen and paper in the forests or by the lakeside.
As much as the outdoors challenge and thrill me, I have discovered that my inner purpose is to give expression to complex ideas in simple language. I find my Buddha Balance by aligning with this inner purpose. I balance out my town’s strong sports culture and emphasis on an active and outdoorsy way of life by regularly engaging in my creative pursuits.
This is how I stay more centred more often than off-centre. This is my Buddha Balance.
Do you know what being centred feels like, for you?
