I used to worship at the altar of balance.
Work-life balance. Balanced portfolio. Balanced diet. Balanced schedule.
You arrange your entire life like a house of cards—everything placed just so, every piece holding up every other piece.
All that careful arranging works perfectly. The schedule lines up. The energy feels even. The plates are all spinning.
And for a while, it holds.
Then a project runs long. A plan falls through. You have to go to the doctor. Nothing dramatic—just life doing what life does.
Suddenly there’s a disturbance inside you—not because something terrible happened, but because something moved. Now you’re scrambling, rearranging, and fighting to restore “balance.”
And you will get it back. For a moment. And then you’ll lose it again. And again. And again.
That’s when I realized what balance actually is.
It’s a declaration: “I organized everything just so. I made it perfect. And I don’t want anything to disturb this delicate arrangement I created.”
That’s the opposite of peace. You’re not living—you’re guarding. You’re managing people, places, and circumstances so nothing tips the scales. You’re treating every unexpected change as evidence that life is working against you.
This is how the pursuit of balance quietly turns your life into a war.
I think there’s a better word.
Harmony.
Balance is static. Harmony is alive.
Balance says: keep everything in place.
Harmony says: move with what’s moving.
Balance says every part of your life demands a slot—work block, exercise block, relationship block, creative block. So you color-code your week like a spreadsheet. And when something runs over, or an unexpected opportunity shows up on the wrong day, you feel the friction. Not because anything went wrong—but because it didn’t go according to plan.
Harmony says: the lunch conversation with your partner is going somewhere real. The workout can wait. You don’t need to reschedule joy.
Balance says your morning routine must stay exactly the same—the meditation, the journaling, the workout, in that order, or the day is already off. One disruption and you feel like you’ve failed before breakfast.
Harmony says: the kid woke up early. The morning is different now. So you adjust. Maybe the walk is the meditation today. Maybe the conversation with your kid over cereal is the most grounding thing you could’ve done.
Balance is rigid. Harmony is responsive.
And here’s the part that surprised me most: harmony requires less effort, not more. Because you stop fighting what’s already happening or white-knuckling the arrangement.
Life was never against you. You were just trying to hold still in a world that was always going to move.
So I’ve retired the word balance from my vocabulary. I don’t want a balanced life. I want a harmonious one—one that can absorb a shock, ride a wave, and still sound like music.
Not a house of cards.
A song that keeps finding its way back to the melody.
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