In a life filled with things to do and things to become better at, I struggle sometime finding a balance. I want to be a good husband/father/son/friend, I want to be good at my job, I want to do the things I like to do and make me happy, etc. I really would love to be able to excel in all of those things, but sometimes that just seems so hard to do because of balance.
For instance, I could definitely spend a lot more time in leisure activities, but what is the opportunity cost for that? How do you like that senior year economics vocabulary coming back to me as an adult? If I were to increase my leisure time, I would be giving up the opportunity to spend time with my family or my job. Since I can’t cut my time as an educator because I have to help pay the bills, that would mean less time with my family. There would eventually reach a tipping point where I’m clearly spending too much time at leisure and too little time with the family, but I don’t know that I ever want to find where that point would be. I love my family and want to be around them as much as I can.
The problem for me is that balance is a trial and error process. We don’t know we’re out of balance until it’s too late. As a pseudo-perfectionist (at times) the idea that I’m not getting it correct can wear on me. Maybe one day I’ll have more definite thoughts on what balance looks like for a full-time educator, husband, father of two, that likes to have some amount of leisure time. Until that time, I’ll keep struggling to find it…and enjoying the ride.