Tis the season of performance reviews and planning for the year ahead.  In almost all conversations, the topic turns at one point to ‘work/life balance’ and how it hasn’t been good, what the reasons for the imbalance is, how things can be different next year, etc. etc.

The work/life balance idea is similar to New Year’s resolutions – nice idea we invest into but rarely implement for longer than a week.  It creates false hope and tends to heap shame upon us as we yet again fail to achieve it.

Perhaps it’s time to give up trying, to stop pinning our hopes to a false reality.  Perhaps its time for a different perspective.  Perhaps we need to accept that life is always out of balance especially as we almost never define what balance is anyways.

How about we acknowledge life is more than work, but work is a meaningful and good part of it.  How about we identify things we imagine how we would like our lives (all of it, not just one part of it) would look like, feel like, be like.

And then, can we also acknowledge our lives will always be complex, that different parts of our lives will be in tension with each other, that this is normal, and that there are NO right answers.  That we, each one of us, gets to decide how the lives we want to live and we do not have to be defined by others.