How’s Your Water?

I’ve never been much of a fan of the balance metaphor as a way of describing our lives and our work as being in competition with each other. When I picture “work-life balance,” I imagine a woman holding up heavy burdens, maybe bowling balls, up in the air while she walks around trying not to fall over. The only time I felt that the metaphor really worked was in the introduction to Mama, PhD, where the editors remind us that when a dancer’s body is in balance, every muscle is working. That, at least, felt validating and true.

Perusing Samantha Parent Walravens’ Torn: True Stories of Kids, Career & the Conflict of Modern Motherhood, I was struck by the observation of my college classmate Alexander Bradner. Bradner writes, “Children need their mothers—not nannies or daycare workers—to narrate the mundane, introduce so many joys, and assist with so many pains…But women need a public voice, external affirmation, internal feelings of triumph, money of their own, and a mental life beyond worry and logistics. Only those free to fulfill their early promise have a chance of living through their fifties and sixties without debilitating regret. So we should be able to work as well.” (“Muthering Heights,” p. 110).

For me, Bradner’s observation triggered something. We need our families, or, writ more broadly, our lives. We need our work—something satisfying that makes a contribution somewhere beyond our selfish inner pleasures. We need life, and we need work. They are not burdens; they nourish us. Granted, they nourish us in different ways, and it usually is hard to cultivate them simultaneously.

I have not fully worked this out, but it also seems to me that work and life usually interpenetrate. Show me a mother who does not think about her children when she is working. Show me a worker who never does any “work” while off the job. I acknowledge that you can’t drive your bus while you’re at home. But I have loaded the dishwasher mentally while trying to go to sleep often enough to suspect that downtime nourishes our ability to do our jobs in important ways.

So now I am in search of a different metaphor, a metaphor that acknowledges that work and life are not just burdens, but needs. And that projects the notion that work and life are mutually reinforcing, not undermining.

Today I am trying out the metaphor of water instead of work-life balance. Water consists of hydrogen and oxygen. We need them both individually, and we need them together. We need them to be connected correctly, in the right proportions, at the correct angles. Let’s try it out. Instead of asking your friend, “How is your work-life balance?” ask them “How is your water today?” and see what you learn.