Balance in Life? Why You Don’t Need it

A balanced life? You know what I’m talking about. Great job, Close family and still time to do whatever you want that makes you happy. The stuff your parents have always told you about. This might be true for some people, but for a fair amount of people who are too passionate about what they love, this might be the single most foreign concept to grasp.

3 days a week I workout. A day each for squat, bench and deadlift. Irrespective of how much sleep I’ve got, external pressures or anything else I would like to tell myself to take a day off, I do not skip on these three days. For most, there must have been a fleeting thought, “That’s not that hard, I workout 5 days a week and I think I’m balanced”. It’s not that simple. This simple activity gives me all the happiness in the world. For anyone who is passionate about something, your time spent doing an activity might not truly reflect how much time you spend on it. You might be thinking about it while driving, maybe while in a conversation with someone else or while alone, just spacing out. For the few of us that this targets, Be yourself. You don’t need to be balanced.

I’ve tried to understand my obsession with powerlifting, a sport similar to weight lifting in that you compete for a highest total, but the main lifts are the squat, bench and deadlift. In Sartrean satire, my passion is to lift up heavy pieces of metal off the floor and set them back down, how could this possibly make me happy? Something of absolutely no intrinsic value in terms of contributing to society.

I eventually understood the solution was to give what you love your all because failure there would still make me happier than ‘success’ in everything else.

“It will destroy you if you try and make it mean anything to anyone else” -Henry Rollins