June 26, 2008

You Have to Balance Before You Can Juggle

“Please don’t talk to us about living in balance. No one does. Even space shuttles veer off course during the trip, and they have computers to guide them. Just teach us how to be better jugglers.”

That was the desperate plea of a woman who had organized an event at which Joan Borysenko was about to speak. Did Joan fall for this line of reasoning? Not really, even though she today wrote a blog entry supposedly “busting the balance myth.” I don’t know if she really meant that or it was just an attention-getting headline, but after four paragraphs, Joan comes around to admitting that balance is not a myth, but a reality. If we fall over, our productivity suffers. “When I’m in balance,” she writes, “the unbalanced hodgepodge of things on the to-do list are accomplished more effectively.”