In the past year, I’ve definitely seen myself try to tackle my goals and resolutions, with one of my top goals being to find balance and “get my life together.” However, I’ve realized through this process that balance is a truly difficult goal to achieve in life and may not even be an attainable life goal.
It feels like no matter what stage of life you’re in, you’re always struggling to find balance. As a kid, it might be struggling to find the balance of how you’re dividing up your time when playing with different toys, or as you grow older, it’s finding balance between keeping various friendships and keeping up with schoolwork.
Doesn’t it ever feel like right when you get your life together, immediately something happens to ruin that balance and your life is back to a mess again? I believe that we’re not meant to achieve this level of balance and order in our lives, based on the concept of entropy: the natural process of things is to move from order to disorder. Whenever I feel like I’m having a great week of working out, taking care of myself, doing all my schoolwork on time and able to see friends; the next week, I immediately feel drained and can’t sustain that type of balance within my life. There’s the concept of entropy happening and it just reinforces the fact that it’s alright not to have your life together at any moment of your life, whether it be when you’re a kid playing with toys, or a young adult figuring out your life. No matter at what point we are in our lives, we will never find complete balance for more than just a short moment, and that’s alright.
As we get older, we continue to add more and more things to our to-do lists and the task of balancing everything becomes more of a chore that seems incredibly overwhelming. I’ve discovered that the whole basis of “having my life together” is when my life is in balance and I’m able to have exactly the right amounts of everything that I want to include in my life. The right amount of time dedicated to health and fitness, to your friends and family, to work/school and to self-care. But having the perfect amount of balance in your life is another unsustainable goal that we have for our lives and constantly seeing people on social media who seem to have their lives all figured out and everything in order add even more pressure to achieve this unachievable goal.
This realization has made me adjust my mindset and remind myself that there is more to life than trying to find balance. Instead of fighting to find the perfect slices of pie to cut my time into, I want to aim to work with what life throws at me and to become more adaptable to changes or disruptions that enter my life. Embrace the disorder!
