#spirituality #selfdevelopment #personalitytransformation
Balance of Work and Personal Life
How to find balance between work and personal life? It's interesting because this question seems so simple, elementary. First, I want to set one thing: allow yourself to consider that throughout your life (no matter how long you live – 70, 90, or 30 years), you will always be in some imbalance between work and personal life, something will always feel off. I'm not encouraging you to stay in this state, but instead suggesting you flip this question in your system, see it clearly, so you know: do you have this problem during a particular period or in general in life?
The first thing you need to do is start treating any events happening equally, to accept that they all have the same importance and priority. People very easily exaggerate the significance of certain events, saying one thing is important, and, on the other hand, they lower the importance of others, saying it's just something average.
For example: it’s important if the child got into school or not; how long my commute to work is; how much I earn; what my boss thinks of me.
It’s not important: what I do every evening; what kind of relationship I have with my parents; how I behave towards others; what my health is like.
A person distinguishes between "important" and "not important": each person does this differently depending on their life. Some will say: “No, Alex, we’ve defined everything correctly, prioritized ‘importance’ and ‘non-importance.’”
The most important thing is not to look for what is better or worse.
Here’s an interesting paradox: when a certain amount of time passes (5, 10, 15 years), we all easily reflect on how unimportant certain events or actions were (everyone has something in their life that is absolutely unimportant). Or, on the contrary, we say how important it was: "How important it was to attend those lectures at university, why didn’t I go to them?" or "How important my concerns about my first job or relationship with my boss were because they changed nothing.”
Every person has such memories, a lot of them. To enter into a state of very broad perception in life, a scale of development (and your life is long ahead, decades more to go), you need to come to an awareness. But not to get changes for a week or month, but to gain changes for your entire future life. So that these awarenesses and reflections over time shift into a mode where you don't feel that something was done right or wrong; where you perceive any events simply as "just life events"; when you know that everything happened exactly as it was meant to – no need for anything else.
Mistakes People Make
Interestingly, in the search for balance between work and personal life, people are constantly looking for something in time. They say: "Work less – work more," "spend more time with family – spend less time with family," "do more with family" – "do less with family," "focus on personal development" – "don't focus on personal development"... An hour, two for meditation, three hours at the gym, two hours reading or drawing every day. People are searching for balance in time.
But first of all, it needs to be found in the importance of events and the understanding that everything that happens in life must happen, and basically, everything has the same priority. Here, by no means should you delve into strange debates. If you broke your finger or have a 104°F fever, of course, it's important to take care of your health right now. Don't get into odd stuff.
If you've chosen the path of development and want real growth in life, to find that key to freedom, and to experience strong personal growth, then that expansion and growth of your life and events lies in neutralizing the importance of things. What you consider unimportant – neutral; what you consider super important – neutral. For some reason, people think that with a neutral attitude, we remove our feelings, emotions, creativity – like everything becomes black and white.
But the thing is, "importance" and "unimportance" – that's black and white. When we get rid of this division, life becomes colorful: it’s full of different shades, and the two camps in our mind disappear. Although our system perceives it completely differently. And the moment we read this, we immediately find an excuse for ourselves, saying all of this is nonsense, it can’t be that way, and assign priority to some action.
Observation Practice
To cope, and not get into such reasoning, you need to observe. It’s hard work. Everyone says, "Observing is easy, just watching, it's such a simple thing." Try observing for at least a few months, definitely not for two minutes. “Observing for several months” means constantly staying in this state, forming a habit. This won’t make you rigid, cold, or a "black-and-white" person, but will make you even more alive than you are, expanding your perception, which will undoubtedly lead to real growth in your personality, life, being. And that’s freedom.