Finding Your Balance

Photo credit: David Hofmann - Unsplash

“Where do you find it – your balance?”

The room and my body stopped spinning as I placed my right foot back on the ground where it belongs, instinctively back in fourth position thanks to muscle memory and years of ballet. My vision of the room immediately came back into focus.

With a lunge I glided in my socks across the expanse of the wood kitchen floor, reaching the island on which my phone was setting to charge, and I hit pause on the music blaring from my phone.

I looked back across the kitchen where my 4-year-old niece was standing with her hands on her hips and her side ponytail swinging, staring at me waiting for my response. Apparently, our summertime babysitting “let’s burn off some of that energy” dance party was in need of a quick chat break.

“Where do you find your balance? When you spin, how do you not fall over?” she clarified.

So, we had a little mini life lesson that masqueraded as a dance lesson. We talked about how you ease into the pirouettes, or the “spins.” How you start small, with 1 spin, and you master that before you move on to 2 or 3. How the most important thing isn’t how fast you can go or how many times you can spin before you fall over. No – the speed and the complexity come with time and practice. What is most important to master when starting to “spin,” I tell her, is focus.

What you focus on matters.

Where your eyes go, so does your body. Try asking any dancer or gymnast or any other type of athlete for that matter, and certainly they would all agree. You keep your eyes fixed – focused – on one thing in order to master the task and achieve the goal.

To spin, you pick a spot on the wall. You keep your eyes on it – and only it – not the whirl of the objects around the room as you spin in circles, but the one spot on the wall. That’s how you can spin and spin and spin without toppling over. And that’s what I told her that day.

And how if you lose focus, you fall down. Sometimes literally.

It’s why a gymnast needs to lead with her eyes while flipping through the air – which is easier said then done – and, if not mastered, will certainly lead to falls and injured wrists and unhappy coaches that make you run what feels like 9 million laps to make you learn the lesson. Something I chalked up as a hard lesson learned in my flipping days…

So, back in the kitchen my niece asked a good question and she received what she thought was a good (or good enough) answer. Or at least she seemed reasonably satisfied with it based on her sliding sock-footed across the floor to un-pause the music, then change songs 3 more times – ultimately landing on the Trolls soundtrack (but, hey, at least it was Justin Timberlake) – and then resume the dance party.

But that question – “How do you find your balance?” – is something I think we can all benefit from asking, and answering, over and over again.

Because it doesn’t just pertain to ballerinas doing pirouettes. Or to gymnasts tumbling across the mat or the balance beam. Or that guy who does televised tightrope-walking stunts across canyons and between downtown skyscrapers. 

No, the question pertains to each and every one of us.

We all need balance.

We see the importance of balance when our routine is interrupted – when the demands of work, or school, or family leave less energy for other things that we enjoy, or when we do something that requires a quick and swift reversal to recalibrate to equilibrium.

… When a project at work requires weeks of over-time hours so you schedule a spa day or – my favorite – a staycation.

… When you pull an all-nighter to cram for an exam and fall asleep as soon as you walk in the door at home after acing your test.

… When you give a presentation that you had been anticipating for weeks, and follow it up with a relaxing dinner date with your favorite person.

… When it’s a worldwide pandemic and you and everyone you know are working from home, with blurred boundaries between home and work, so you create new routines: coffee on the patio, closed doors to the “office” (aka “extra bedroom/home gym/office/and everything else” room), and a walk around the block to signal the end of the work day.

… When you’re 17 and your best friend attempts to highlight your hair at home, it turns out neon orange, and you traipse back out to the store 10 minutes before it closes wearing a baseball cap to get the most neutral hair dye you can find to counterbalance it (FYI the shade is called “sand” and, in a pinch, it can do wonders … 😉).

It’s balance – and it’s important to think about.

It’s knowing when you or your circumstances have swung too far in one direction, and doing what you can to ease the needle back to the middle of the gauge.

And what moves you back toward equilibrium? Well, it is probably a bit different for each of us. What balance looks like for you is likely different than what it looks like for me, and the next person, and the next person.

As a graduate student, they literally taught us this stuff – strategies that can help find balance.

What are some of the leading contenders based on psychological research, you ask?

Explore the outdoors.

Healthy habits like exercising.

Connecting with others.

Rest.

Mindfulness.                   

All great ideas. All super helpful. But not all right all the time – nope, what you do to balance out a challenging day at work, or a not-quite-stellar presentation, or a misunderstanding with a friend, may differ. It depends on the situation and it depends what you’re focusing on.

Me? I can’t run after a 12-hour workday. I know this, because I tried it – and I hated it. It was the most unrelaxing experience. After running around appointment to appointment, meeting to meeting all day, running along packed sidewalks in downtown Dallas alongside congested traffic and Ubers everywhere, past packed bars and restaurants, with music blaring from patios – not relaxing. Not in the least. But meditation? Yoga? Totally did the trick. If my focus is on “calming down,” these have become my “go-to” balancers.

So much so, I momentarily thought I found the “golden ticket” for thriving in graduate school – meditation and yoga. Close – but not quite.

You only have to fall asleep so many times while meditating to realize that maybe “proactively” attempting to balance out a busy day with a meditation session immediately upon waking up for the day is not a feasible or effective solution – at least not for me.

On the same note, you only have to wake up so many times to see your husband just staring and laughing at you as you lay flat on your back on your yoga mat in the living room, while he claims you fell asleep doing yoga again. For the record it was Savasana pose and I was just resting my eyes… 😉

My point is that finding your balance can be complicated – it’s trial and error, it’s unique to each of us and every situation, and it varies over time – but it is so important to figure out.

And in order to balance, we need to keep focusing on what it is we truly need in that moment, which will change when currents rise up and winds gust unexpectedly. Our focus shifts and we do what we need to rebalance the scales.

So now I’d like to ask you, in the words of my wise-beyond-her-years niece, “How do you find your balance?”