What Is The Correct Balance?

All throughout this pandemic I’ve felt bombarded by anonymous advice.

“Establish your side-hustle.” / “Be okay with slow days.”

“Make use of all your abundant extra time.” / “Healing trauma does not happen overnight.”

“Learn a new skill.” / “What you do does not define you.”

This either/or, binary way of thinking is deeply flawed and deeply human. We lack a refined sense of the commonplace precisely because it is commonplace. Normally good and normally bad are both normal, and humans are fantastic at taking just about any situation and finding a way to become bored with it.

I’ve struggled lately with whether I’m doing enough and, paradoxically, whether I’m doing too much. I’m grateful for my sister who likes to wryly remind me that: “bro, there’s a pandemic.”

So I’m left in a pickle while COVID-19 doesn't appear to be getting any better. What, then, to do? I’ve binged watched TV shows (old and new). I’ve read books (old and new). I’ve napped (pretty old behavior, really). Hell, some days all I’ve done is shuffle from under the covers of my bed to under a supremely comfortable blanket on my couch. On other days I’ve studied for trade school, applied to contract jobs, started and stopped different writing projects, refereed when I’m lucky, set up online appointments with my doctors, and hung out at my recently re-opened pool.

On some days I feel like I’ve knocked out some serious progress on myself or my projects. On other days, it’s a slog, and I have to be ever vigilant against my depressed nemesis lurking in the back corners of my brain. Fortunately, I have strong medication and coffee to beat that sucker on especially low days, and I’m happy to report those are much more infrequent than ever, but I don’t like this situation. I can’t measure my progress in life against past standards because those standards are useless in an era of social distancing, masks, and hand sanitizer.

I lean on the stoic philosophy from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

There is no balance. That concept is a farce requiring two bits of data that the human mind loves to compare - good/evil, feast/famine, joy/misery. The obstacle facing me — COVID-19 and its complications, does not require that I balance days of productivity and days of sloth. I am not required to maintain a tally of my perceived successes and failures. Nor am I meant to compare myself to someone who learned a new skill or someone who couldn’t get out of bed.

But, I’m human, so I do these things.

I find it comforting to realize that I’m the only one holding up a measuring stick on myself in this viral world because then I can take a step back. I can slow down. I can get off the mental seesaw and approach this obstacle one moment at a time.

If you’re on that seesaw I invite you to take some time to get off the thing because the only way we can really evaluate our lives and our actions is from the security of level ground.