I can walk a tight-rope. Can you?

Ok, I can’t walk an ACTUAL tight-rope, those people are crazy. But I am working on balancing my life. To be honest, sometimes I fall. It’s hard to balance everything in life. Family demands on one side conflict with job demands on the other. Financial responsibilities conflict with recreational desires. Economists call these sacrifices ‘opportunity costs’, or the cost of what you give up in order to get something else. You give up family time when you go to work. You give up the opportunity to ensure additional financial stability when you go on vacation. So how does one take all these factors in our lives and balance them all so each has a share, while keeping enough time for ourselves?

Everyone has struggles in life, things that step in the way of their goals or challenges to overcome while just doing this thing we call life, like an unexpected bill or illness, family emergency or sudden event obligation. What we each need to determine is our needs as a human being, a person of worth and value, to meet our needs so we can try to meet the needs of others. Abraham Maslow developed the “Hierarchy of Needs” in 1943 and I still feel this is relevant today. It all starts at the basic needs for survival all animals have, clothing and shelter for protection, food and water to consume, and air to breath. Next comes some less critical but still important needs like security; personal, financial, health and a safety net. Above that are things like social needs; friends, family, love and so on. My point is, given that every single person has these needs, we need to strike our own balance to meet them all. Life is chaotic enough on its own without us feeling out of balance or unable to meet all of our own goals. Feeling overwhelmed is a force of nature unto itself.

So many people just grow up with this habits instinctively developed, they don’t take the time to make themselves mentally aware of them to even consider that the habits they have aren’t balanced with other needs and should be tweaked for optimal happiness. So look at your needs, find your tipping points on all of them down to eating too much/not enough food or sleeping too long/little, and work on that tight rope act.

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