Core 07: Why Balance Is the Wrong Goal
Six weeks ago, I started writing about intentional living. We’ve talked about purpose, time, drift, responsibility, constraints, and the difference between goals and meaning. And if you have been reading along, you may be feeling like you have a lot of work to do.
Seven pillars: Career, relationships, fitness, diet, finances, spiritual habits, and hobbies and rest (coming in the next post 🙂). Each of these are worthy of attention, and each of them quietly reminds you of the ways you are coming up short.
If you are like most people, the natural response to looking at all seven is to reach for a familiar word: balance.
I just need to find more balance.
It’s the language our culture uses to describe a life that is working well, but balance is actually the wrong goal.
The Problem With Balance
Balance implies a state you can arrive at. A life where each of the seven pillars are each getting exactly what they need each and every day.
That life does not exist. Not because you are doing it wrong, but because that life is not how being human actually works.
Life is not a pie chart with seven equal slices, it’s a series of days, weeks, months, and years. Some seasons demand more from your career because you are building something that requires intensity. Some demand more from your family because a child is struggling or a parent is dying or a marriage is in a challenging chapter. Some demand more for the pursuit of an event like a marathon or a Spartan race or a weight loss journey.
In every one of those seasons, some pillars get more of you and some get less. That’s not imbalance, that’s reality.
When you frame your life as a pursuit of balance, some seasons can feel like a failure. The season of intense career focus feels guilty because you are not giving equal time to your family. The season of caring for a sick family member feels guilty because your fitness or diet is getting neglected. The season of building something new feels guilty because rest is on the back burner.
The guilt is not evidence that you are living wrong. The guilt is evidence that you are using the wrong measuring stick.
Balancing, Not Balanced
A reframe that has changed how I think about this is that the goal is not to be balanced but balancing.
Those two words look very similar, but they mean completely different things.
Balanced is a state that implies that you have arrived somewhere and everything is in its proper place. But because it cannot actually be achieved in the way most people imagine, it becomes a source of constant low-grade disappointment.
Balancing on the other hand is a practice. It’s the ongoing, active work of paying attention to what a specific season requires, and making conscious choices about where your energy goes, but ready to adjust when the season shifts. Balancing doesn’t assume equal distribution, it assumes intentional distribution.
A tightrope walker is not balanced. A tightrope walker is balancing. Every step is a small correction, a micro-adjustment based on what the wind is doing and where the rope is swaying. Stop balancing and the tightrope walker falls. The moment you and I believe we have arrived at balance is usually the moment right before we lose our balance.
That is what intentional living across seven pillars actually looks like. Not a permanent equilibrium, but a daily and weekly and yearly practice of noticing what a specific season needs, choosing where your attention goes, and accepting that some pillars will get less of you during certain stretches because others need more.
This is not about lowering your standards, it’s about aligning them with how our lives actually happen.
My Current Season
Right now, BFAP is getting a disproportionate amount of my time and attention. I am creating content that didn’t exist a few months ago, and I am building something from the ground up on top of a full-time job, a family, and all of the other things in my life. Building this takes time, and I have had to consciously choose to give it time in lieu of other things that could fill the space.
That’s not accidental. It is intentional. But that choice means other things are getting less of me right now. I am watching less TV. I am reading fewer books for fun (though I am reading different ones for the sake of what I am building). I have pulled back from some of the other ministry stuff I have carried in previous seasons.
I am not telling you this because I have it figured out. I am telling you this because it’s an example of balancing in real time. None of these choices are permanent, and the season will shift. What BFAP requires in year one is probably not what BFAP will require in year five. The practice for me is not to try and have the perfect distribution of time and energy. The practice is to keep paying attention and be intentional.
Greg McKeown wrote a book called Essentialism that I come back to often. His argument is that the disciplined pursuit of less produces more of what matters. Not because you stop caring about things, but because you acknowledge that your energy is finite, your time is finite, and the refusal to choose is itself a choice.
You are choosing, whether you realize it or not. The question is whether your choices are intentional or accidental. Balancing is intentional. Drift is accidental. And the difference between them is usually just a matter of whether you are paying attention.
Seasons Are Biblical
There is a passage in Ecclesiastes that captures this better than anything I could write:
"For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace." - Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
The writer is not describing imbalance. He is describing the rhythm of how life actually works. Different seasons for different things. A time to build and a time to rest, a time to grieve and a time to celebrate, a time to focus intensely on one thing and a time to broaden your attention.
The biblical worldview doesn’t promise a permanent equilibrium. It helps provide a foundation for the idea that rhythms and seasons are a natural part of life. Sabbath is built into the weekly rhythm precisely because work and rest are not supposed to be evenly distributed every day. Our time is meant to be concentrated differently throughout the week.
That is not an imbalance. That is design.
The Closing Question
Over the past seven weeks, I have tried to help you look honestly at your life. Your purpose, your time, your drift, your responsibilities, your constraints, your goals, and your spiritual foundation. The point of all of it has been the same point that sits at the center of everything BFAP exists to do:
To help you live on purpose, because you were born for a purpose.
If you are walking away from this initial series of posts feeling like you need to achieve perfect balance across all seven pillars, I have failed you because that’s not the goal. The goal is to help you and me become someone who is balancing well. Someone who pays attention to the season they are in. Someone who makes intentional choices about where their time and energy goes. Someone who does not let drift make the decisions that intentionality should be making.
You will not get it right every day, and I sure don’t. Your balancing will be imperfect in the same way mine is. But imperfect balancing, pursued consistently over years, produces a life that actually reflects what you value. And that is infinitely better than hoping that your life will work out.
So as this first series closes, I want to leave you with the same question that has been underneath every post: What is your life saying about what matters to you?
Because your life is speaking. It always has been. The question is whether you are listening.
