The idea of balance comes up often in discussions of women’s lives. How do we balance work and family (and friends, and well-being, and intellect, and politics, and art)? How do we fairly share home and parenting duties with our partners?
Sometimes when I think about that balance I imagine finding a solution: a perch atop the mountain where I am stable, easy, and calm. Equilibrium.
But this is, I suspect, the wrong metaphor. Writing in Women in Higher Education, Dr. Lisa Rossbacher and Dr. Julie Newell suggest, instead, the metaphor of dynamic equilibrium, a term from geology describing energy balance in a landscape:
For example, a stream is affected by the characteristics of underlying rocks and soil, fractures, vegetation, slope, rates of uplift, precipitation and groundwater levels.
The stream will “work” to adapt changes in any of these factors by eroding the surrounding banks and channel floor, deepening its course or depositing sediment. Over time, changing climate affects dynamic equilibrium too.
In a sense, we all manage the landscapes of our lives in similar ways. When we have more work to do, we shift our energy to pick up the load. When family or personal demands increase, we shift our focus there and let work slide a little.
When we reach the new equilibrium point, we readjust, but that equilibrium point is always changing.
What are the consequences of such a shift? Equilibrium is defined over a period of time, rather than at a particular moment. Any given day may be devoted entirely to work, or to children, or to leisure; the balancing occurs on a longer timescale, a week or a month or a year or a decade.
And what does this mean in practice? For one, you can attain equilibrium without ever feeling calm. Equilibrium may mean perching precariously atop that mountain, lurching first in one direction and then another, never quite falling down—or perhaps tumbling quite a distance, and scrambling to regain your footing.
I sometimes imagine that once I attain balance, in my own life or in my marriage or in my friendships, I will feel at ease, free from conflict or second-guessing.
But these goals, of balance and of ease, are in fact distinct. After all, Prometheus, chained forever on a mountaintop with an eagle that devoured his liver every day, was at balance.
Where, then, do we look for ease? In a more equitable distribution of labor, perhaps? Stay tuned for Part 2…