True Life Balance is Really About Boundaries

Whether you’re thinking about work-life balance, or just a generally balanced life, what comes to mind?

Here is a common mental model that terrifies me, as a recovering perfectionist: the wellness wheel.

Use Wellness Wheels to Touch Your Floor, Not Your Ceiling

A wellness wheel is like a pie chart, and each slice of the pie is named for an area of life. The wellness wheel covers dimensions of life that are admittedly important to pay attention to: physical, environmental, social, financial, spiritual, emotional, intellectual, occupational and/or financial. Here is an example of a wellness wheel, and here is another.

Wellness wheels, unsurprisingly, also come pre-loaded with definitions of wellness in each life area.

For me, the wellness wheel strikes terror into my heart, because — as a counselor who uses these with her clients once told me — everybody’s wellness wheel is bumpy. As a recovering perfectionist, nothing terrifies me more than looking at a perfectly balanced wheel and knowing I’ll never get there.

If the aim is to be balanced in that sense, with high achievement in all areas of life (as defined by others), most of us will never get there. And many of us may not want to get there in the first place.

What the wellness wheel model is helpful for is as a system check: look at these life areas, and have an idea of what is minimally necessary to do, to keep your life functioning. Use wellness wheels to touch your floor.

Don’t aim high. Aim low. What’s the floor here, for each of your life areas? iguring out your acceptable minimum — what’s good enough for now or maybe even good enough, for good — is really useful.

At minimum, for now, success in your finances might mean building up a small emergency fund. Good-enough fitness might mean you get in a walk a couple of times a week.

Acceptable Minimums Differ for Everyone

Acceptable minimums will differ for everyone. For example, my daughter, who worked in a dermatology practice for a time, has an awe-inspiring skin care routine: multiple steps, with all kinds of potions and lotions. I see the value of it for her: some things about her appearance bothered her, and her skin care routine has helped. Also, she enjoys potions and lotions! So I asked her — after keeping up my general acquaintance with soap and water — what is the minimum I could do to take care of my skin? She recommended putting sunscreen on my face every morning. That is too minimal for my daughter’s routine, but it is an acceptable minimum — good enough — for me.

A wellness wheel helps us reflect on areas of life we all have to deal with. But don’t compare your life to a wellness wheel. Instead, use tools like the wellness wheel to figure out acceptable minimums.

After that, the next step is to figure out where you want to go all in.

It’s Boundaries, not Balance: Be a Garden, Not a Wheel

If you are going to be distinctive, if you really want to focus on your gifts and strengths, you are bound to be unbalanced in the wellness wheel sense. You may be really strong in some life areas: maybe you love your work! Or maybe you can’t imagine taking a job that would require you to move away from your family, or a job that would interfere with your passion for community theater.

So, let’s abandon the wheel, and turn to the earth it rests on.

You are much more like a living landscape than a wheel.

Don’t Plant Lemon Trees in Vermont

When you look at yourself as a landscape, consider your temperament, your talents, your opportunities, your life circumstances — the “givens” of your life, what you have to work with — as similar to the soil, micro-climate, rainfall, slope, and sun and shade of a particular place. (Wellness wheels are generic; but all places — and people — are particular.)

When you add intention to what you are given, when you look at your yard and say, “hmmm…” …that’s when you begin to cultivate a garden. Maybe you start checking out other gardens in your neighborhood. Maybe you amend the soil. Maybe you set in some stones or shrubs.

Every garden is different! Every garden is distinct! And gardens are constantly changing, from season to season, and year to year. No garden achieves “balance” in a wellness wheel sense: no garden has it all. Think of a small city yard, under deep shade; think of a desert landscape where rain is precious and rare. And yet you could still create a stunning garden in each place.

I’ve lived all over the United States. I’ve had yards with lemon trees, and yards with lilac bushes. But not both in the same yard. You have to work with boundaries. You have to work with your givens.

At my home now, we have dappled morning sunlight in one patch of the yard, and a withering afternoon blaze in another. The soil is dense with clay. Those are givens we work with, and those givens determine what we plant where.

We can amend the soil; we cannot move the sun.

Just as a patch of land has distinctive characteristics, so do you. These characteristics are some of your boundaries. Parts of you are like a climate: we can manage our minds somewhat, but an introverted person will probably never be drawn to start a business throwing parties.

And with those characteristics — what your “givens” will permit, what your landscape will accommodate — you also bring your own preferences and vision: do you want to grow corn and beans? Do you want to create a Zen rock garden? Do you want lush flower beds?

Your preferences are also boundaries. I admire Zen rock gardens, but have no interest in maintaining one. That’s a boundary. I can’t force myself to prefer something I know I won’t do.

Our garden has its natural and communal boundaries: we have certain shady and sunny areas, we have fungi that inevitably attack tomatoes, and we have our personal boundary, our personal policy, of not spraying chemicals in our back yard.

And I also don’t plant or prune anything in my next door neighbors’ yards. That’s a communal boundary, and I don’t want to get arrested.

These are the boundaries we work with. Just as a garden has natural boundaries with its givens, with its climate and setting; and boundaries related to the community; and boundaries due to the preferences of the gardener, so do you.

Growing Our Selves, Like Growing Our Gardens, Takes Time

Don’t worry too much about being well-rounded, or well-balanced.

Aim instead to grow into your self. Work with your givens to grow something unique and beautiful, to fulfill your potential, your particularity, something to share with the world.

And you can start very small - in fact, the best gardens grow over time; it’s a conversation between the gardener and the land and the plants and the micro-climate. When I started my backyard garden, I was told that it takes at least ten years for a garden to come into its own.

I think that is about right.

It’s not a race.