The Balance

Maintaining a balance between family, fitness, work, and fun is the perennial challenge. Like my favorite guitarist says, "Sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you're the bug..." Mark Knopfler has it right.

Lately, I've been the bug. But the trick is to keep moving forward, fighting to restore the balance when it makes sense, and just riding the wave when fighting won't help.

Sometimes, you have to know when to just step back from things and let the situation settle down a bit - let something go while other things occupy a larger proportion of time than they should.

Which places you atop a slippery slope - skipping out on the things that make you whole even for a short time leads to longer and longer periods of imbalance... next thing you know, you wake up and it's been weeks, maybe even months since you last did that thing you miss.

I've often said that I've yet to meet someone who'd died wishing they'd worked another day. And that my day job constantly gets in the way of my hobbies... but at the end of the day, our day job tends to be the more definitive factor in our longer life, the thing that people most remember us for, the thing that pays the bills and creates new opportunity to do like George Carlin said, "Buy a bigger house to keep your stuff."

There's a symbiosis between our day job, our hobbies, and our family life - each, in balance, makes the others better somehow. As much as we'd like to believe there's a 'place' we'll go and find some kind of static situation, a utopian life where things just magically work out, well, that's probably never going to happen.

Or is it?

I think they call it retirement.

But first we have to pay the bills...