I Have Great News! There Is No Work Life Balance.

 

By Kim Marquardt, RN MSN

This blog post is from the Nurse Kim archives of myth busting. I want to share some "alternative" or maybe just lesser known health and wellness viewpoints for you to chew on.

*These posts are not intended as official medical advice.

They ARE meant to be fun, informative, and thought provoking, hopefully sparking an interest for you to do your own research (you can start with the links I provide!) and discover the marvels of the human body, and how it can function at its optimal performance level if we understand how it works and interacts with our environment and our diet.

I have a passion for health and wellness through lifestyle and nutrition and have done thousands of hours of research in addition to being a registered nurse for 23 years. I have done A LOT of self-experimentation in and around diet, lifestyle, body care, and supplementation and have spent a lot of time looking into the science behind it all (or lack thereof!). Check back weekly for the latest post!

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Have you ever actually met someone who told you their work life balance was totally on point – they had the perfect number of responsibilities and tasks to accomplish, the right amount of time with loved ones, a hobby they enjoy, and time to get everything done before their head hit the pillow every night?

Yeah, neither have I.

I was just at a great leadership retreat put on for the administrators by the college president (shout out Sunny!) and there were some poignant and very tangible things shared, by the speakers, and by my colleagues about this topic that I want to pass on to you all.

The conversation caused me to have an epiphany of sorts which can pretty well be summed up by the title of this post, but of course, I cannot just say that without explaining myself. And further, explaining why I think this is “great” news.

Life is hard.

Let’s all first sit with that for a moment. I think sometimes just saying it out loud and acknowledging it is the first step towards rectifying this “balance” thing we are all after. I want to also add, “hard” is not synonymous with “bad.”

Hard abs, hardwood floor, and hard kombucha are just a few examples of “hard” being great! Silliness aside, hard builds us… yes maybe first it breaks us, but that is what life is literally about… growth. If we are not growing, we are not living. So maybe that gives a little tweak to our perspective on “hard.”

Okay I didn’t mean to get that preachy right out of the gait, but now that we have that out of the way, I want to suggest a new aim to take the place of “balance”…

Contentment.

Learning how to be content I truly believe is the key to happiness (for lack of a better word). And I want to take a minute here and say I kind of hate the word “happiness.” It’s like the word “normal.” No one really knows what it means, and it seems like some elusive, unattainable goal that once we have arrived at a place where we think we should have it, it’s fleeting, or still just out of reach. But for our purposes, I think you get what I am saying.

Back to contentment.

Now “content” does not mean you are not striving for a goal, aspiring to do something, or moving forward in any way. It simply means you are okay with being in the moment and experiencing everything that moment holds without judgment, guilt, worry, or stress about yesterday or tomorrow. That’s my definition anyway. And that moment could be a lot of things:

• It could be feverishly typing a blog before all the thoughts leave your brain as the morning caffeine drains out of your system.
• It could be folding the laundry.
• It could be riding Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland.
• It could be cleaning up dog poo.

I think we have a skewed perception of when we should “be in the moment” and only think it applies when we are standing in front of the Grand Canyon or celebrating a milestone birthday with friends.

The problem with contentment is, it seems nearly impossible to achieve. But I believe we can train (okay maybe “force”) ourselves to experience it.

You see, at the leadership retreat, I finally realized why I have never felt the “out of balance” thing the way other people describe, even when my kids were 0 and 2 and I was working full time, 12 hour night shifts as a bedside labor and delivery nurse, sleeping 3-6 hours a day, missing holidays (the hospital doesn’t close on holidays), and cooking, cleaning, dishes, laundry, family, friends, dogs, cats, poop, pee, dust, grime… life… was all happening.

True, working night shift and being sleep deprived all the time probably worked in my favor because I was too tired to know how tired I was. But I want to share a few moments from the nursing bedside that gave me perspective on the “balance” thing, and how that has affected the rest of my life.

In case you didn’t know, nurses can be very sarcastic, maybe cynical, maybe jerks…

When night shifters would roll in at 7pm and walk by the nurses’ station to go get changed into our scrubs on an especially busy night, the day shift would eagerly and obnoxiously lean over the counter and say things like, “Hope you have your roller skates on.” (Don’t worry, we did the same to them when they came back in the morning.)

What I learned in those moments were 1) how to shoot laser beams out of my eyes at other nurses, and more importantly, 2) I can only be in ONE place at ONE time.

I KNOW! The revelations in my blogs are life altering!

Okay okay, but seriously… I will say it again… YOU CAN ONLY BE IN ONE PLACE AT ONE TIME. Maybe you can multitask and do 10 things in that one place… great. But you can still only be in one single moment at a time, focusing on what is in that moment. There it is… the “in the moment” thing.

What ELSE I learned that’s maybe even more important than the physical reality of having just one body to move around in…

IT’S TOTALLY OKAY because everyone else is in the same boat!!!

I know I am belaboring this in the most elementary way, but I am telling you… THIS is what has allowed me to be okay with this absolutely wild ride we call life and all it brings!!!

I am OKAY with not doing everything all at once, perfectly, beautifully, with a smiling face, in 5 minutes or less. Or get this!! Maybe NOT AT ALL!! Sometimes I would be dealing with one crisis and miss another and someone else had to deal with it, or I had to deal with it when I was done. OH WELL! I can only do what I can do when I can do it.

I cannot tell you how fully embracing and accepting this (BECAUSE I HAD TO, TO SURVIVE!) has changed my entire perspective on life, and “balance.”

There is no balance. There is right here, right now, this moment. And when it is done, there will be another right here, right now, this moment. And so on. Some people define this as “enlightenment.”  

I guess I’m enlightened.

And guess what being “enlightened” allows? Because I have taken the pressure off, I am MORE productive, and feel like I have MORE time to sit around and stare at the wall if that’s what I feel like doing (with no guilt and no judgment of course).

I know not everyone can go work for 15 years as a labor and delivery nurse and be forced into this perspective like I was. But maybe reading this can help a little. Or maybe you can seek out situations in life that build out more perspective for yourself. My suggestions for that (because what would one of my blog posts be without telling people what to do?):

• Volunteer (oops never mind you have too much to do, lol!). But really, if you can, giving of oneself allows so much perspective to naturally happen and it’s so rewarding.
• Pay attention to what is going on around you. Sometimes just hearing from other people and their journeys benefit our own.
• Stop judging yourself, your time, your productivity. Just do what you can do, one thing at a time.
• Take breaks. Whatever this looks like for you, build breaks into your life. Sometimes I didn’t even get a bathroom break during a 12 hour shift. No problem. I sat in my backyard after I got home and stared at a tree for 5 minutes before I passed out.
• Ask for help!!! Oh my gosh, this KILLS me! I hate doing this, but you know what? I am too darn proud to FAIL because I didn’t ask for help when I knew full well, I needed it, so there! Ask for help because you are too proud! How’s that for a paradox?

Until next week my friends. Take a breath, go stare at the wall for a second… and if the cat starts hacking up a hairball two feet away, just grin to yourself and be okay with it. Who cares? You’ll get to it when you get to it, or maybe the dog will first… even better.