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| Sometimes you need more bubble time! |
I’ve felt a bit like I’ve been grasping at straws since coming back from our big trip, to the point of not knowing how to tell the story of our vacation, even though it’s a great story and completely positive! I came back with a “let’s change the world attitude”. This sent my ADD into overdrive, of course. There’s nothing more exhausting and counterproductive than being stuck, with yourself, inside your head while ideas are flying at 90 miles per hour in different directions. Now I’m finding myself in a reflective mind set, a much better state of mind because there is room for rational thought and enough clarity to make changes and decisions. That sounds like it should be right…right?
With reflection comes self analysis and here I am stuck, again. How does such an amazing, once in a lifetime trip through Europe begin this tedious mind meld? Culture, lifestyle. It was so different! I got to bask, with my entire family, in a culture that in some very important ways, has it figured out. We had a driver at one point explain, “We work to live, not live to work.” It was that simple. There was an understood family-comes-first focus; work-life balance is an actual lifestyle and not a philosophical discussion.
On top of being able to watch a new culture in action, I was also able to spend almost every waking minute with both my husband and my daughter and my parents. I watched my daughter learn, I watched her grow older and even a change in personality was evident. I don’t mean to suggest that my child has some amazing learning ability where she changes in leaps and bounds in the matter of days. I do believe however, timing wise, we were able to witness a growth spurt that involved both cognitive and behavioral changes. It made me think about everything I miss spending countless hours at work or how much less attention and patience I have after working a full work week.
Once we got back home my husband and I spoke in length about how reenergized we felt after our trip. How we felt that our eyes were more “open” to the world around us and things seemed to be in perspective. We felt that living a more simple and family centric life would be beneficial to us. But we both work in corporate America, in a culture that has meetings to discuss achieving work-life balance, to define it, but does little to put anything into practice to achieve this goal. How do you live outside the “corporate culture” in one aspect of life, the piece that affects your home, while still staying an “engaged employee” who plays by the “corporate rules”? Can you? If you can, are you committing career suicide?
We have so little time with our children, as children. I’ve watched the last 20 months fly by. I feel the last 14 months (since I returned to work) have just melted into a blurred memory. It’s now become a personal, internal battle to strike a balance for my family. There are times as an adult and especially as a parent that we need to make sacrifices for what’s best for our well being and that of those little ones that rely on us. Staying home may not be an option for us at the moment but having quality time with family needs to take precedence.
What do you do to achieve work-life balance?
