Balance is an important part of life.
This may be one of the earliest lessons you ever learn about how to navigate your life. Eat a balanced diet, be balanced emotionally, balance your time. These balances help us to regulate ourselves in order to navigate our everyday lives.
There is another balance that, as we enter later years of school, becomes more and more important: the balance between work and personal passions.
We often separate our personal lives and our work lives simply for the sake of self-preservation. Work can be a lot of things, but most often it is something we would rather forget doing. Sometimes work can drain us so much that when we get home, all we can do is sleep until we have to return to work again. This leaves us very little energy for personal projects, our hobbies fade into the background, and the career we choose can become our life. So how can we ever balance the two?
Work becomes the crux of a lot of people’s future decisions, whether it falls into their lap, is the most convenient path, is the most lucrative path, or is what a person loves most. This also comes down to a balance, and is more often than not a windy road of all of these paths. The ideal career has been presented as one that satisfies all of these needs at the same time – to satisfy the ideas you want to make real and to make the changes you want to see in a field. When you enter into academic work in your field or in a job in your field, there is a desire to have it be something that you are passionate about, to satisfy this personal gratification component.
The desire for personal gratification can sometimes become the idea of a legacy. To make something that supersedes you in both lifespan and social reach. Some people have a desperation to be remembered, not even just as a person but in their work. To have your art reach this level satisfies deeply the personal need to communicate your ideas to the world. To have others connect with your work and elicit an emotion is highly desired in any field.
The Phoenix opinions writer, Avery Cummins, spoke to her own experiences with this:
“Truthfully, I want to leave a memorable legacy so badly. When I was younger, I always hoped that I would do something to change the world or make some huge institutional impact that would put my name amongst other women who changed history like Malala, Greta Thunberg, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Now I have lowered my expectations. It’s not that I’ve given up on trying to make a difference, but I don’t know how I can force my way to the forefront of history. I feel like it’s something that just has to happen coincidentally, not something I can force myself to do.”
Feelings like these can often feel almost burdening, heightening the chances of burnout and getting no work done at all.
Often it is that the most personally gratifying work — especially in the field of arts — is the least wallet gratifying, and the most time consuming. The Phoenix operations manager, Noah Davis, when asked about the subject, wrote:
“For me personally I really want to become a professor because I'd really enjoy teaching people about poetry or art history, I find it really invigorating when people want to learn about these topics from me and allow me to go on these really heated tangents about those topics … but it's going to take years for me to get there due to the educational requirements and experience needed.”
The truth is, though we all wish work was always fun or enjoyable in the most basic sense, it is often not. Even doing what we love can sometimes be arduous and labour intensive. But we do it because we love it. This seems like an oxymoron, but as The Phoenix news writer, Quinlin Osadczuk wrote:
Drinking hot cocoa all day while reading without a care in the world? I would love that. My passion, however, lies not in my comfort, but in my difficulties.
So how do we even know if our work is what we are passionate about? Can this balance ever reach equilibrium? Avery voiced her doubts:
“There’s no way for me to know for sure that I am really going to love my career in the future and I am always afraid that I’m going to regret spending thousands of dollars in tuition only to find that I actually hate every avenue I have to explore.”
These are rational fears to have, especially if you have everything to lose in setbacks. But fear does not help any situation. Noah wrote:
“To me work is something that is and should be (I hope) something that you've always imagined yourself doing.”
And I agree. I urge you to not settle for anything less. Seek that balance. Do not allow yourself to become comfortable in your routines until you are first fully headlong into what you are truly passionate about. Though it is a difficult road, if you continue down it you will find your own way.
Thank you to the members of The Phoenix team for their insights.
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