About 8 years ago, I arrived for my first post-law school job in my ill-fitting navy blue suit. For the next five years, almost everything I did work-wise was intended to further the goal of economic equilibrium. I've moved on a bit, but in many ways, my perspective on life has been measured by a set of personal supply-and-demand curves: Am I balancing my work with my family and personal time? Am I knitting too much? Do I have enough cards to stamp on? Do I have enough gel pens at work? Too many?
Even before my son’s birth I’ve been searching to achieve some sense of balance in my life. However, I have yet to reach a place where I can actually say that things are balanced, at least for extended periods of time.
I question whether “balance” actually exists and is achievable—or if it is just a fiction that serves to provide one of many goals that just help keep us “going.” Then, if balance can be reached, is it then a static concept? Can you essentially freeze your circumstances to that you remain in a state of balance?
So began the experiment. This blog is just my attempt to capture, organize, and many parts of my life, and then determine whether these things I’ve been doing have actually unknowingly given me some semblance of “balance,” whatever that thing actually may feel like. Here is where I can try and weave together the individual threads of life as a mother of a toddler and wife to an endearingly funny man-boy who manages to charm and confound me every single day. Here is where I jot down random, scrambled observations in scattered words. Here is where I ponder about my latest journey into making jewelry or think out loud about interfacing options for handmade handbags, and then show the pictures of those creations (when I remember to). This place also gives me the opportunity to write, which is something that I’ve found lately to be to my liking, thanks to some very wonderful sources of inspiration.
This site, therefore, was named what it’s named. The concept of “equilibrium” is one of balance, where supply meets demand: no less, no more. Perhaps you might think that I’m dreaming if am trying to actually achieve a concrete, permanent sense of balance simply by writing about those things that “balance out” the things in my life that have an excessive influence. But I believe that whether you can actually achieve balance is an open-ended question, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever arrive at an answer.
I don’t think I need an “about me” page, even though whenever I visit every other blog, I always go to that person’s “100 Things” page first. This probably means I am nosy. However, for me, all of those the details on a single, searchable page on a website make me a little uncomfortable (but not much), and so you will see them scattered throughout my entries.
You will notice a lack of any explicit references to my work life, outside of being a mother. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, the nature of what I do requires me to have a high level of confidentiality, and to basically discuss the specifics of my work environment and my profession is essentially career suicide. However, you will occasionally find references to certain concepts in my entries that might help you piece together for yourself what I do career-wise. Frankly, I don’t recommend taking the time to do that. You will bore yourself to tears. Second, more often than not, my job is precisely the thing that I am trying to balance with other aspects of my life. Therefore, this place captures the “everything but work” parts of my life.
It’s not that I don’t take pride in my professional life. People who have Googled me have told me that the search taught them that I’d accomplished a fair bit in the past handful of years. However, lately I’ve come to realize that it’s not the “end-all/be-all” that I had considered it to be while in college. There are reasons for this particular change that are detailed elsewhere, and some people stumbling across this place might be privy to those things, but here is simply not the place. Here, I get to focus on the “other” parts of my life, the parts that really should have the spotlight, if only on a semi-anonymously-kept blog.
I’ve categorized entries to correspond with all things creative (including discussions about other’s work), family life, ramblings about what I see going on “out there in the world,” and shopping. That very last category is one that I have some misgivings about, but that might just be good old Catholic guilt tapping on my shoulder as I sit and tap-tap-tap away at the keyboard. I like to “window shop” online in the sense that I like to look for “just right” items, regardless of whether I buy them or not, and so these entries are just my way of listing the things that I’d like to buy (regardless of whether I actually buy them) and just telling some friendly folks what I’ve found. So enough with the guilt, already!
Hope you enjoy my thoughts, observations, and ramblings as I try and find—and perhaps maintain—equilibrium.