Tilting

 

On a recent podcast, I heard a discussion with researcher Marcus Buckingham about how the happiest women don’t try to find balance in their lives. Instead, they ‘tilt’ (his word) towards doing the things they love.

A life of balance is an illusion we strive for. There is no such thing. If someone has their life fully in balance, one small, unexpected movement or intrusion could bring everything crashing down. Balance means you’re static, trying to hold everything up all at once. Instead, his advice is to move and tilt, embrace the imbalance.

That’s fine, I thought, if you have the luxury to do that. But there are countless women who don’t, who rush from home to office to errands to home and wake up early the next morning to do it all over again.

But the studies showed that even overworked women with very stressful jobs reported being happier in their lives, if they spent at least 20% of their day, every day, doing activities they loved.  Buckingham says that every activity has some emotional resonance; it is your own uniqueness that propels you towards doing what makes you feel good, so pay attention to that.

Now that’s nothing new. We’ve heard variations on ‘follow your bliss’ or ‘follow your passion’. But one small exercise mentioned was to chart, over the course over a week, things you did that you LOVED, in one column, and things you did that you LOATHED, in the other column.

I thought I would try it. Having said that, I’m not the ideal candidate for such an exercise, because I don’t have dependents, I no longer rush to catch a commuter train and my time is very much my own. Nonetheless, I drew a line down a page, and wrote down the two headings: LOVED, LOATHED. I should also say here that I’ve been off this past week, so there was nothing about my work life that would make it in either of those columns.

To my surprise, I found the LOVED column had numerous entries, the LOATHED column hardly any.

How so, I asked myself? Does this mean that I am too self-indulgent? Am I avoiding doing the things I loathe? (The answer to the latter question would most likely be yes). Maybe there should be a third column: AVOIDED.

In the LOVED column, daily I had entries that included three or more of the following: read, walked, wrote, painted, played tennis, played pickleball, swam, laid in the sauna, writing group meeting, solo lunch on a patio, lunch and walk with friends.

My LOATHED column had a measly few: stacked/emptied the dishwasher; morning exercise routine (this I do while listening to a favourite podcast to lessen the loathsomeness of the activity); laundry; review taxes (mind you, not doing, just reviewing what my accountant did). See? I’m either avoiding the hard stuff or I’m really, really lucky. A couple of days the LOATHED column remained blank! The house never got cleaned this week or it would definitely have made it into the LOATHED column.

There was one activity that I was positive would make it into the LOATHED column by the end of the day: Visit Service Ontario office for driver license and health card renewal.

I arrived, convinced I would be in a long line-up of tired, disgruntled people, impatiently waiting their turn to step up to the counter. Surprise, I walked in and straight up to an employee. I said a cheery good morning to the woman behind the desk, expressing my delight at the lack of line-up. She peered at me, taken aback at my friendliness, then softened a bit – just a tad, because surely there must be a code somewhere that requires all service desk personnel to maintain a frosty demeanour. But she did inform me that I was lucky because the day before had been chaotic. I was out of there in five minutes – my fastest visit ever at a Service Ontario office. The activity never made it onto my LOATHED list.

The objective of the exercise is not to look for life balance, but to look for movement towards the things you love, those things that uniquely define and delight you, then tilt madly towards them. These are the things you look forward to with anticipation; activities that, once you begin (even if you procrastinated starting them, like writing), you find yourself in a flow and know you want to come back to it again and again; things that make you feel energized rather than drained.

We all have tasks in our life that need doing, whether we love doing them or not. But the study showed that even nurses who worked extremely long, tough, grueling hours during the pandemic were more resilient if they spent 20% of their day doing something they loved. That was the threshold – 20% every day, not one or two days in a week but daily. Luckily, or maybe because I’ve contrived it that way and am avoiding the tedious, I’m batting a lot higher than that.

But if we can include daily those ‘LOVED IT’ activities that resonate within us, feed us, and release all the right kind of chemicals, then we can handle the “LOATHED IT’ stuff with grace and efficiency.

Turns out, tilting your life, not balancing it, is where the joy is.  Buckingham advises: Take what you love seriously.