Fierce Excerpts: “Work-life balance, the lash with which we punish ourselves.” —Whyte

by | Jul 28, 2015 | Fierce Excerpts, From the CEO

Photo: Me and my son Jack

Now Reading | How to Break the Tyranny of Work-Life Balance.

The very first paragraph of Maria Popova’s article won my heart:

The equilibrium between productivity and presence is one of the hardest things to master in life, and one of the most important. We, both as a culture and as individuals, often conflate it with the deceptively similar-sounding yet profoundly different notion of “work/life balance” — a concept rather disheartening upon closer inspection. It implies, after all, that we must counter the downside — that which we must endure in order to make a living — with the upside — that which we long to do in order to feel alive. It implies allocating half of our waking hours to something we begrudge while anxiously awaiting the other half to arrive so we can live already. What a woefully shortchanging way to exist — lest we forget, so speaks Annie Dillard: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

She writes that English poet and philosopher David Whyte aptly calls “work-life balance” a “phrase that often becomes a lash with which we punish ourselves” and offers an emboldening way out of this cultural trap. As a woman and mother who is also an entrepreneur and business owner, the phrase work-life balance has never set well with me. It has never made any sense. When you are in the middle of the swirling tides of motherhood and running a business, balance can not always be found. So what assumption does that make—failure? I don’t accept that, not for me or for any woman. When asked about it by young women just setting out on a similar journey to mine, I always say that it’s not about balance, it’s about managing. You have to learn to manage both your work and your life in a way that makes your heart happy and some days are harder than others.

The current understanding of work-life balance is too simplistic. People find it hard to balance work with family, family with self, because it might not be a question of balance. Some other dynamic is in play, something to do with a very human attempt at happiness that does not quantify different parts of life and then set them against one another. We are collectively exhausted because of our inability to hold competing parts of ourselves together in a more integrated way.

Whyte also says this: 

Work is a constant conversation. It is the back-and-forth between what I think is me and what I think is not me; it is the edge between what the world needs of me and what I need of the world. Like the person to whom I am committed in a relationship, it is constantly changing and surprising me by its demands and needs but also by where it leads me, how much it teaches me, and especially, by how much tact, patience and maturity it demands of me.

I was reading a great article in the Times the other day, Recalling Marlene Sanders, a Force in TV Journalism. This is what the author writes:

In 2000, Cynthia McFadden, the senior legal and investigative correspondent for NBC News, attended a party given by her friend Jeffrey Toobin, a staff writer for The New Yorker and legal analyst for CNN. There, Ms. McFadden was catching up with Mr. Toobin’s mother, Marlene Sanders, the pioneering television reporter. She asked for her advice on managing motherhood and a career.

Ms. Sanders put both hands on Ms. McFadden’s shoulders and peered into her eyes. “Never apologize for working,” the older woman said. “You love what you do, and loving what you do is a great gift to give your child.”

Mr. Toobin, Marlene Sander’s son, said he loved having a mother who worked outside the home, even in an era when it was not that common. “I found her career exciting,” he said. “I loved to watch her on TV. Guilt was never part of the equation. And given her temperament, if she had been home all the time, it would have been a close contest to determine whether she or I went insane first.”

The struggle is real for every woman who is both a mother and truly passionate about a career or a cause. Christiane Amanpour, chief international correspondent for CNN, says this in the article:

“Being a mother of a very young child when you are in a war zone, or anywhere very far away, is so tough, it is so, so tough,” she said. “All you care about is staying alive for your child, but you always have to put another hat on and focus on getting the job done right and getting the goods first. It is so tough; it is utterly, heartbreakingly tough.”

In the Times article, the author talks of Ms. Sander’s later career as a teacher. She taught a class on advanced television reporting at N.Y.U.

“She breathed the news and liked to try to get them to inhale deeply.”

She was fierce,” Ms. McFadden said. “She was no cupcake. She was nobody’s powder puff.”

Every woman has to find a way to make work and family and children and marriage and relationships weave together in a tapestry that they find beautiful and meaningful. It’s never simple. It’s never as simple as work-life balance. But it’s a magical thing each time it’s discovered and rediscovered.

“We are each a river with a particular abiding character, but we show radically different aspects of our self according to the territory through which we travel.” —Dan Whyte

Read the Times article here:  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/19/style/marlene-sanders-a-force-in-tv-journalism.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=1

Read Maria Popova’s article here: http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/11/david-whyte-three-marriages-work-life/