Remember: Life is all about the best balance!

The Buddha asked the monk Sona, “Is it true that before you became a monk you were a musician?” Sona replied that it was so. The Buddha asked, “What happens if the string of your instrument is too loose?” 

“When you pluck it, there will be no sound,” Sona replied. 

“What happens when the string is too taut?” 

“It will break.” 

“The practice of the Way is the same,” the Buddha said. “Maintain your health. Be joyful. Do not force yourself to do things you cannot do.” We need to know our physical and psychological limits. Right Diligence lies in the Middle Way, between the extremes of austerity and sensual indulgence. 

– Chapter 14 The Heart of Buddhas Teaching

This story teaches a very important life lesson, everything in life works on balance. But how can we create that balance?

We can find the balance by analyzing the component which needs to be balanced. For knowing which component needs to be balanced you will have to understand the problem in life. But in the majority of the cases you can link the lack of balance to two major components:

Money

Time

For example:

• In Work-life balance, the component we will have to manage is the time between your family and your work. 
• For, becoming wealthy the component which needs to be balanced money which can be achieved through balancing your earnings and savings. 
• To achieve happiness we need to balance our time between the things which we love doing and the things we do just for living.   
• For achieving self-fulfillment we need to manage the time between our spiritual life and our materialistic life.

If that balance is not maintained then in the long run it can have disastrous effects on our lives. So, after knowing the component what must we do?

Analyze the component. Make a list. Eliminate or reduce unnecessary things.

Let us take the example of Work life balance to understand this. In Work life balance we know the component is time. Now, I will analyze what things I am spending the majority of the time. I will make a list of things that I am spending most of my time. After making the list my next task is to eliminate or reduce the unnecessary things.

If I found that I am working more hours due to being unproductive then I will incorporate some techniques like Pomodoro to increase my productivity. If I found I spend long hours in meetings then I would try to club some meetings or just get the gist of some less important meetings than attending the whole meet. 

So to conclude:

We might feel there is no way to balance things. But it is not true, you just need to stop for a moment to analyze that component and just think about how can you balance it. And soon enough you will get your answers.

The Pareto principle can be applied to everything, searching for the right balance can solve the majority of the problems in our life. 

I will leave you with the quote from Jana Kingsford:

“Balance is not something you find, it is something you create”