Is Your Life Balanced?

By Maria Khalife

“Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.” ~ Thomas Merton

Everyone with any degree of sensibleness wants his life to be balanced. The tips for how to achieve this or for the Key Ingredients that make it demonstrable vary from opinion to opinion. I’m going to lay out some ideas for you to see if your life may be in balance.

Life is like a mental sandwich:

• part work
• part play
• part serious thinking and
• part restful enjoyment.

Another way to look at it is:

• All that you do is enjoyable
• You feel capable of handling all of your problems
• There is a foundation of happiness in your life
• You like who you are and are comfortable in your skin.

And still another way to consider if your life is balanced is this:

• You take good care of yourself.
• You understand and honor your own boundaries and priorities
• Your mind, your life is organized and efficient
• You capable of going with the flow and are not easily upset
• You see the glass as half full

I think that any combination of those thirteen elements would produce a balanced life for you.

I’d like to suggest that you go back and re-read them once more. This time, notate which ones make you feel uncomfortable.

Discomfort is your soul’s way of letting you know you are off track and that some correction is called for.

Making changes can be as simple as changing your sense, your thinking, about an issue. Let’s look at the point called “All that you do is enjoyable.” We all know that we can turn hard work into play by slathering on a layer of enjoyment to the task. Look really, really hard at what you think is NOT enjoyable, and see if you can find one small piece of it that is enjoyable.

Sometimes, repetitive tasks become humdrum and boring, but even with them, you can search out something enjoyable as you get them done. For example, I’m more talented in the areas of words than I am in numbers. So when it comes to doing accounting tasks, I used to have a burdensome sense of procrastination.

And then it dawned on me that balancing a checkbook or balancing the books for the month was a task of extreme precision. And then I got to thinking about the extreme precision of the universe, and the wonder that none of the planets collide!