A Resilient Relief: Career and Life Balance

Other kids illustrated their plans. They had fire hats, or a nurse’s cap, or a teacher’s blackboard. I wonder if their lives turned out like mine, because when I was 28, there indeed was the fire in the woodstove of my house on the lake. Only the two dogs that were there belonged to my boyfriend at the time. I did always wonder about the dogs, having been a cat person myself.

On my report cards, there were always paragraphs and paragraphs about how I was not quite right, although I was getting good grades, there was some concern. She is different, they’d all say, worryingly.

To me, I couldn’t see how a career is separate from your life; a career and life balance that can’t be separated. If you are living in a city you can’t wait to escape, you are already aware of what it’s costing you as you commute.

They say that the happiest people in life have the shortest commute, and I think the pandemic taught us that this measure isn’t one you want to minimize to zero. A nice short walk seems about perfect to me, and was the criterion when I bought my second house. It was bigger than I needed, but with relief, as my grandma praised it, it was perfect.

Growing up, I might have ingested the lesson that you get one career, one employer, and you do what it takes, because that’s what was true and admired in my household. I’m glad I got to see that there are other deals to make with your time, your life, and your money. My engineering mentor told me, “If you are going to leave, leave now.” I left.

I’m glad I didn’t fall into a trap before I saw it as one.

Helpful Truths

When it came to motherhood, my mom told me that kids ruin your life. Yep, in short, it’s no longer “yours.”

I wanted to know how to do “my own” before I ever attempted to do it for someone else, and I knew I didn’t have it figured out yet. If things hurt when they are self-inflicted, then they are torture when you inflict them on those you love by total mistake.

I was given two dolls as a preteen. I named one Ashley and the other Tiffany, and today, I know how much names matter, when people might only ever hear that, and it’s enough to close a door.

Some called them a product of love. My mother took many, many hours painstakingly making those dolls by hand during the Cabbage Patch Kid craze. Career and life balance, when you are not working, still looks like spending your time in ways that align with financial decisions.

For the career part, then you have to find people who care. For me, Tiffany and Ashley spent their lives on the top shelf in my closet. Whenever I was told to play with my dolls, it was nap time, and I was reading my book. Some people’s kids are just like my dolls: a supposed product of love that is unwanted by the recipient and ignored by those who are supposed to care.

The right market for the dolls clearly wasn’t me, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t out there. Or does it?

When the government labelled her startup a failure, she was sure she just needed a new website. As I write to crickets, thinking I just need to make an effort in marketing, I, too, might be spending my time however I want, oblivious to whether anyone else cares.

With or Without Passion

I was no success in business either, but I am much richer for the experience.

Looking back, it’s a relief that I’ve tried so many things. I have a diverse range of experience, if not depth. I became a Jack, not a Master, and followed my needs and my passions. My career began because of the respect it earned when I said that I was going to become an engineer.

I found math difficult, wondered what kind of impediment it would be, and forged ahead. I chose an art elective over biology because I wanted just one thing to look forward to in my schedule. Math and science would take care of me financially, and that’s all that mattered to me. You work for money, right, so why not go after the most you can get?

My flawed thinking diminished the volume of passion in my life until it grew so dim that I worried I could not re-ignite it. Not enough money to fan the flame to find why we bother with life. What’s it all about, this pain that we praise, like it’s fundamentally and primarily the best gift?

Without passion, you will grind. Without career and life balance, you will arrive at a halt. Hopefully, when that halt happens, you will have saved enough money to be set.

Whenever it happens, sit down and remember what you stopped doing because no one praised you, no one wanted to do it with you, and you had nothing to show for it when it was over.

Then you will remember where that twinkle is waiting for you to realize external praise is nothing compared to internal peace. That the need to be productive is the disease of capitalism, and you might already have everything you need.

Chinks in the Illusion

You don’t need to sell everything you make, and you don’t need to make anything at all.

You can simply be. That is primarily the fundamental and primary gift: you are you, and there never will be another one, and there never was one before you. Simply existing as a unique and distinct entity made of the exact same things as everyone else. The same cells, the same feelings, the same experiences, but yes, in different situations. I didn’t take biology, but I know that we are all pretty much the same. Human, they call it, human being.

I believe that this similarity, at a cellular level, makes us all equal. I bleed red, so do you.

But no, my sister argued, of course there is a rank.

If you believe in a rank, then you must do something all the time to see where you are, see how you can convince others that you are higher than you really know you are, and see how you can actually climb higher before they find out you are creating an illusion. Career and life balance goes out the window, and you live to work.

There is much activity in the mind and the world if you subscribe to the rank. When you see through the emperor’s new clothes, you don’t subscribe.

You see the chinks in the illusion when you discover that money and a great address don’t prevent you from getting cancer, getting gunned down, or getting fired. Things can happen that remove rank, and if that’s the case, it’s not the person, it’s the stuff. You can praise any kind of group, and yet within that group will be someone whose behavior calls into question the group’s good reputation. Clergy and criminals cannot be so easily separated.

You can’t take it with you. Fortune is not the same as feeling rich. Sometimes it is embedded in things that cannot be sold or have no market value. You can be owned by things as much as you think you own them. One woman I knew was going through a divorce. Wanting to hold on to things she no longer had room for, she put everything into storage. A year later, she hoped that selling it all would pay the storage bill. Holding on can be costly.

My prior vehicle was stolen out of my driveway while I slept. When they located it, a crackpipe family was living in it, and that was because there were many pipes in it, and stuff. So much stuff, they called me down to see if any of it was mine. The truck was set up like a little boy’s room, the back seat was a woman’s, and the front was a man’s room. I was super happy they didn’t wake me up and kick me out of my house, because what they’d really needed was a home. Good thing they didn’t know what I looked like, and that it was only me in there.

Today, I have guns, crossbows, knives, cameras, and eyes wide open to what it means to be safe and sound, and it has nothing to do with having insurance. That useless shit? Only buy where and when legally required, and hope you never have to use it.

With a career and life balance today, I don’t need most of the stuff I bought. The jewelry, the fancy clothes, the makeup and perfume…all the things that I used to use to make the first impression that I belonged, when I didn’t. What a relief, and not just financially.

Upside Down World

When I was growing up, gardening was a chore. It’s pulling out the tomato plants in the dusky, cold after-school hours with bare hands. It’s turning over the hard soil in the chilly spring, pulling weeds in the sweltering summer, chucking peas, scrubbing carrots, and remembering to turn the sprinkler off.

If it took me eight years to become a hunter, it took me longer to become a gardener. First captivated with the idea, I realized I lived in a place where the price of water made it prohibitive. I realized why rain barrels were so pricey, and how you could easily justify the cost. As I set about acquiring one, the neighbor kids set about destroying my process at every step. When they kicked the death out of my water barrel, I decided it was time to move.

My neighbor told me that they’d tried teaching respect, but it wasn’t working. I told them to forget the difficult concepts and teach them what a fence is for. Here’s a line, don’t cross it. Make it simple, master the basics.

Kale is one of those basics for a budget-smart home gardener. With career and life balance, eating is smart; growing your own is smarter.

At my new address, it took me a few years to get permission to plant a garden. Where I’d lived earlier, kale survived the winter and kept going in the spring. I wanted to test it here. One night, looking out at my garden, I saw my neighbor ripping out my kale plants and leaving them in a heap. With relief, I was able to save about a quarter of them.

Why are neighbors so difficult? I couldn’t help but wonder. Boundaries? Just stay on your own property. How is that so difficult?

Miracle Plants

Like a single mother on a fixed budget, I know that growing tomatoes, carrots, and peas will deliver relief at the grocery store. One day, I will be a smart gardener who can afford the indulgence of flowers, exotic fruits, and vegetables, but one crop at a time.

One day, I was pulling out dandelions to plant lettuce. Now, this might seem perfectly normal to you, if you grew up as I did, with many summer days digging them out of your lawn. If you heard too many conversations about kinds of poisons that are allowed, and kinds that are not. If you too lived in cities where there were bylaws against ignoring them on your lawn.

Dandelion leaves were in the lettuce mix I’d purchased from the grocery store. I’d paid for dandelion leaves. Yet I was ripping these ones out, ones labeled with the added value of “organic” and costing a little more.

More, I was doing it to plant lettuce, which I’d use for salad.

Feeling very Sisyphean, I wondered what else I didn’t know. Headed to the library catalogue, I ordered up books related to foraging, ancient remedies, and indigenous knowledge. I learned that the dandelion was one miracle plant, and we call it a weed? We attempt to eradicate it; we curse its existence. And in doing so, create many problems.

A weed is something that grows where you don’t want it to grow. We are trained to want to grow non-native grasses that are maintenance- and resource-intensive. It takes care of our time and money, nature’s remedy for career and life balance.

Perhaps we’d rather remain busy and distracted than notice the everyday miracles occurring before your very eyes.

Pervasive Weeds

A dandelion root can be roasted and steeped with water to make a coffee substitute, yet demand for coffee has created an economic ecosystem, if also a scar on the plant. For career and life balance, what would happen if everyone swapped?

I know I’d see many fewer Tim Hortons coffee cups in the ditch. Everything they’d need when they open their eyes for a pick-me-up is no closer than their backyard, or front yard, or even a crack in the sidewalk.

The sunny yellow tops are edible and nutritious. The seed heads are wonderful for making a wish and watching it carry forward into the universe.

I wish everyone knew how lucky we are to have this plant, yet God is up there shaking his head, “I gave you food, and you died of hunger. I gave you free will, and you follow each other’s instructions. You have two eyes, and you rarely watch what you are doing.” Rolling over in His grave.

I spent a lot of money on seeds, until I realized that a tomato plant had sprung up where I hadn’t planted one, not this year, but I had the year prior. That sparked a journey into seed saving, and when I had far more than I could use, I donated the extra to the library and its seed library. You can take whatever seeds you need, and the hope and faith is that, one day, you will return seeds to the library. Not the exact same one, obviously.

Seeds are abundant, free little miracles, and if you need some awe and wonder in your life, plant some, water the dirt, and when they tell you that you are supposed to thin your seedlings, you may not have the heart to do it either.

That’s my current challenge as a gardener – not killing enough of them as sprouts.

Dandelions aren’t the only maligned plant. Many, if not all, of the so-called weeds I’d ripped out of lawns had medicinal or nutritional properties that were historically highly valued.

So, what happened? Relief. Convenience, commerce, capitalism. We swapped knowledge for now.

Today, I can walk across the street to the pharmacy, or I can chew some plantain and rub it on my scratch. Before I get to the store, the plant already did the job. How’s that for now?

The problem is, what about the six months when there is snow on the ground? Ah, planning ahead and stocking up takes time, doesn’t it? I’d rather do what I want now, instead of preparing for the winter. Now.

Career and life balance is just like the seasons; like a pendulum that never swings fast enough or stays where you want it to.

I watched a movie about a woman still angry that her beau married someone else. 48 years later.

We store emotions for later, instead of feeling them right now or because we want to feel them on demand, all of us caught up in our own little games of can’t-catch-me.

Those hurts we store, often without realizing we did it, become physical. Louise Hay wrote the diagnostic bible on the link between thinking patterns and physical maladies.

Dr. Joe Dispenza knows that we can heal ourselves. He was the victim of a car accident while riding his bike and suffered a broken back. He refused to resign himself to the future his doctors were describing, and instead, visualized his bones healing. Not only would you not have a clue that this happened to him, but he has also taught others and witnessed miracles.